Honestly, while I dislike advertising "unlimited" anything that you don't really want people to make use of, who the hell has time to download let alone listen to over 10000 minutes of music (~180 hours) per month? I mean, that would require listening to over 8 hours of music every business day of the month, with NO repeats. And you have to select and download all that music too. Jesus Christ. Get a life people.
So it's reasonable to assume that people who are downloading over 180 hours of music a month are probably sharing their accounts, or something. Or just abusing the service. Downloading more music than a single person can conceivably listen to in a month is abusive. But anyway, why don't they just say "Download all the music you want, up to 10000 minutes of music a month!" instead of saying "unlimited". There will always be some who leach and seek to abuse the system - but no need to be dishonest, just state the limitations and expectations up front.
Great idea (it's been tossed around before several times on/.) but not so great execution. I mean, I wouldn't donate money to an organization that barely discloses who the individuals are behind it. I finally found ESR's name on their webpage, buried somewhere. Hmm... Not sure if he's what I envision for a community representative. A good guy, strong beliefs, but doesn't package terribly well.
What GeekPAC needs is marketing. I hate to say it, but it's true. This needs to be wrapped up in some way that doesn't use the word "geek." I know, I can use the word to describe myself when I'm in a self-deprecating mode, but I don't think it will make a great impression on Congresspeople - imagine - "Congressman Smith, the geeks are hear to speak with you again." I mean, I know we as a community have taken the negative connotations of the word and tried to turn them around, but that's not reflected in the common understanding.
Maybe something like Technological Progress and Liberty PAC. Anything but GeekPAC.
Re:*Sigh of relief*
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Film Gimp
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
This is slightly offtopic, so forgive me, but does anybody know what happened with Katz? Did Malda give him the heave ho? Did he get sick of posting stories to/. only to get 100s of troll comments - because, let's face it, he just wasn't that well liked by the Slashdot community. In some ways I miss his stories. It was sort of nice to have an editor to hate. When I was in a really angry vindictive mood, nothing made me feel better than going and getting in some serious flamewars that only happened when Katz posted his extraordinarily flamebaiting opinion pieces.
I am just curious about this, since you can see from Katz' profile that he hasn't posted anything on Slashdot since April or May, and everybody seems to know he's gone, but I can't seem to find any stories or posts anywhere explaining the story behind his departure, or what he's doing now (no, it's not like I want to go read his drivel elsewhere, but I'm curious nonetheless).
And so I'm not completely offtopic - Film Gimp is great - wish more companies would invest money and time into customizing and improving open source tools and releasing them back to the public like this. This kind of contribution could really help some programs like the Gimp to go from niche programs for amateurs and non-serious work to serious professional workhorses.
I don't know any of them, but I rode in the elevator with one in the Media Lab back when I was working there as a research assistant a few years back. Fucking spooky when you hear a guy quietly clicking away with his one-handed keyboard-thingie while staring straight ahead. It was like he had no awareness of my presence or any other people around him.
Frankly, that kind of thing isn't good for humankind. I'm all for connectedness, but when we are so connected we lose our connections to the immediate world around us and the people right under our noses so we can email, check weather, and write code all the time - well, we truly lose some of what makes us human. And that's sad.
Yes, of course that's the same thing. When you put words along the lines of "Hit List" or "Top Ten Most Wanted Baby Killers" and have blood spattered images and check marks next to deceased doctors, don't you think the _context_ is a bit different? In the same way, yelling "Fire!" when you are alone in a forest is the same verbal intonation you might make in a crowded theater, yet one is an illegal act due to the context. Context is sometimes more important than content when it comes to first amendment jurisprudence, as it should be, since the same words can mean different things and result in VERY different consequences depending on when, how and where they are used.
Well, you are right that this is not good legislative practice, but I disagree on the slippery slope side. In general the "slippery slope" is considered a logical fallacy, and for good reason. There is no such thing as absolutely unfettered free speech in any functioning society, and not every society that restricts free speech ends up like Iraq or North Korea. Even in the US we have restrictions - it's just that in my opinion, our restrictions are well developed in years (centuries) of jurisprudence. Things like slander, libel, fraud are all forms of illegal speech, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater and other forms of speech that serve not for the purpose of argument or discourse but to cause immediate, direct harmful results to people (i.e. they are legally considered "action" rather than "speech") and so on and so forth.
Leaving it up to ISPs is nice, but the only reason any ISP would ever restrict anything is fear of civil or criminal lawsuits and preserving bandwidth. They don't give a rat's ass about social responsibility for its own sake. And there are things that SHOULDN'T be legal to publish on the web or anywhere (for example, hit lists of abortion providers that encourage murder and provide names and addresses to assist in the commission of a crime).
If Europe wants to make "hate speech" illegal, they should make clear what the exact standards are and how they still allow for reasonable debate and discussion of all issues. If the public feels those standards are appropriate for all forums of discussion, then they are within their rights to ban European servers and ISPs from carrying material in violation of their laws. Democracy is tyranny by the majority. I don't like it either, which is why I don't consider myself a democrat (little D).
I had to disable my roommate's Kazaa uploads the other day. AT&T BroadBand has set up their bandwidth throttling to be so severe that even with Kazaa set on max 2 uploads and supposedly throttled at 24kbps, it was causing severe latency problems with our net access. In particular, I was getting 1 second - 2 second pings in Counter-Strike, web access was crawling, and everything just felt slow as shit. No problems since I disabled it.
Of course, even with the throttling set to 24kbps, it still looked like there was over 32kbps going upstream. I don't like being a leech, and I'd love to share some bandwidth to a reasonable degree, but with such tight limits on our upstream bandwidth, there's not much I can do. Also, my old strategy (when I wanted to play Counter-Strike or latency was being problematic, I'd just block port 1214 at our router) doesn't work any more because new versions of Kazaa do crazy port-hopping stuff to prevent being blocked. No choice but to disable it entirely.
I guess my point is that there is blame to go around here. Companies like Kazaa need to provide better throttling in P2P products (there is no way to throttle to less than 24kbps... that's fucking retarded) and need to ship with throttling enabled to avoid flooding networks. And ISPs should realize that blocking is retarded - it will just piss customers off. Bandwidth throttling is okay, but give us reasonable limits. My service shouldn't slow to a crawl just because I am using 24kbps of upstream (ATT Broadband), and my service shouldn't get disabled for 60 seconds because I open a lot of connections (Verizon DSL - doing a server refresh in Counter-Strike makes the connection throttle and then shut down after polling a couple thousand servers, and it won't come back to life for 60 seconds).
Crippling the software I choose to run is unacceptable, and if you do it, I will be forced to shop elsewhere.. err... you have a monopoly. I guess I'll just have to take it in the rumpelstiltskin. Never mind.
Just a friendly word or two. Now imagine for a moment that room, cleaned up, only a desktop or two, and a single monitor. No networking hardware, no rackmount shit, no cables strewn all over the floor. And imagine that you bring your domicile up to the relevant fire codes, and repaint the burned walls, and put in some carpeting, or at least an area rug. Now imagine that you shower and shave (I know, it's tough going, but just bear with me here), and maybe even go to the gym a few times a week.
Now imagine a gorgeous woman having sex with you every night in your new, socially acceptable domicile. See what I'm talking about? That could be you. Just something to think about.
I know living in a geek-o-rama pigsty is cool and everything when you wanna have a Counter-Strike LAN party on your bare concrete floor, but you can be a geek and still have hygiene and a relatively normal residence, and those girlfriends will start banging down on your door. Then you won't need the 11 monitors and surround-sound pr0n.
First, you are making a common error. You are making the assumption that the lack of integrated device drivers is a problem with linux as opposed to a problem with vendor support.
No, I'm not. It's not about out-of-the-box support. The problem is that EVERY driver requires a recompile with the kernel. For example, look at the Nvidia drivers. OEM distributed binary drivers won't work reliably across MINOR kernel versions without a recompile. This is unexcusable IMHO. Furthermore, I was only pointing this out as a roadblock to automated hardware detection/driver download from a centralized repository. Of course it's not reasonable to assume that any OS should ship supporting all hardware, but there's no reason I should have to manually download drivers, unless I want to use something other than the default driver for my hardware. Even Windows doesn't do this yet either, I agree, I usually (9 times out of 10) have to go to a (usually shitty) hardware vendor webpage to download drivers. Sucks, and it shouldn't work that way in an ideal world. That's all I'm saying here. Vendor support of hardware is another issue entirely, but that's a business issue not a technology issue.
Just so you understand, I'm not using Windows as the model of perfection here, just pointing out that Windows has some facilities in this area that are decent. Some Linux distros are great at autodetecting hardware (Mandrake for instance), but if you have some piece of hardware not shipped with the OS, it's MUCH more effort and less fundamentally automatable to get a driver installed and working for any arbitrary Linux distribution than it is for Windows, though I make no claim that either platform has such facilities built in currently.
You are also correct that the Windows driver facilities have some fundamentally broken "features" as well - requiring all those reboots is one of them. Linux is certainly much better in that respect.
I still think the Linux hardware model is broken. If you want to see why I think this way, look at the Mac OS X hardware abstractions and C++ driver model. It is SO much nicer than Linux. There is a stable contract/interface between the OS kernel and hardware drivers.
Agreed about organization strategies for data. When we move to a more semantic, knowledge-oriented representation of data, and use RDF to describe all our contacts, then perhaps the computer will get smart enough to suggest logical hierarchical representations of the data based on what it knows. Or at least so Tim Berners-Lee would have it.
It's nice to say that we shouldn't need to know about those fancy "network connection" thingies to get email or weather or all this other data. Unfortunately, there are little problems, like you have to plug in an ethernet cable to the back of your computer first. Now, I haven't had to think about the network connection on a Windows desktop PC in sometime - they generally just work (assuming the drivers are up to date and so forth), thanks to the modern magic of DHCP and my friendly home router box. My point is that software can get smarter about handling problems, AND IT HAS IMMENSELY in the last 5 years or so. I hate to defend Windows on this one, but this is exactly where Windows does have a leg up on Linux. Sure, you can make much of your hardware work on Linux these days, but having to compile kernel modules for new drivers because there are ill-defined interfaces between the OS kernel and the drivers? Ugh, that is backwards (look at OS X for a beautiful hardware support/driver model for a Unix-based OS).
In fact, I believe that the above is exactly why the OS DOES matter. A well designed, well written, well supported OS should make it seamless to interact with your hardware, should be able to automatically fetch drivers over the Internet (when a connection is present, and help set up a connection if none is available yet). Admittedly much of this functionality is part of the "Desktop Environment" and GUI, but it absolutely needs to be supported by the underlying platform. You can make the greatest Linux Desktop Environment ever, and you still won't get seamless hardware support no thanks to a flexible but ultimately inadequate driver model (and other issues).
Certainly the next logical step with the human-computer interface is higher levels of abstraction. That goes without saying. The problem is making a GUI that abstracts things in this way and still lets us get as much work done as efficiently as we currently do. In other words, it can't be frustrating or get in the way, which most attempts at new conceptware desktop environments have in the past. I mean, Palm OS does a great job at this honestly - while you do save and load data files, rarely do you ever see or even consider a "filesystem" per se on your PDA. When you want to take notes, you open the note application thingy, when you want to add new contacts or email, you open that.
The problem with this model is it works great for a device that you only expect to use to manage basic personal information and to function as a glorified organizer. It doesn't fly so well when we are talking about general purpose computing platforms.
It would be appropriate to note that this "crack" doesn't allow you to obtain free service, and that this has never been about free service. It's just about the ability to modify your Tivo, install cool things like TivoNet cards and so forth. Tivo keeps making this more difficult with every release. And each time it wears away a bit of community goodwill, which is sad because its this thriving community on which Tivo has built a business.
Sorry dude, you are 100 miles off target. You aren't allowed to remove that muffler because it affect the PUBLIC GOOD, not because it adversely affects Ford's bottom line. There is massive gap between laws regarding use of your possessions in a manner contrary to the manufacturer's bottom line, and laws regarding use of your possessions to infringe on other individual's rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (and no, a corporation itself or a business model do not have rights).
A better example might be buying a 2003 Ford Mustang, ripping off the exhaust and installing an aftermarket exhaust system for 2003 Ford Mustangs. If Ford says "but we sell our Mustangs at a loss, the EULA says you will buy parts and maintenance from Ford" you would tell them to go fuck themselves. Likewise when a hardware or software maker tells me what I can do with a product I legally purchased.
Well, I was working on the assumption that though he appeared to be a troll, there are always some people who don't know what the significance of the ICANN is. Furthermore, I didn't copy and paste anything - I just wrote off the top of my head what I know of the ICANN's responsibilities and relevance - like I said, I'm not an expert on the topic, but I've certainly dealt with some domain name problems in the past, enough to give me a healthy respect for the importance of ICANN to maintaining a fair and orderly Internet.
Well, I'll assume you mean this as a legitimate question. I am not the most qualified person to answer the question, but I'll tell you what I do know. The ICANN ultimately sets up procedures and policies for registering domain names and controlling the allocation and deallocation of all TLDs (top level domains, like.com). Why do they control this? Because everybody has always agreed that they do. So to say you are connected to "the Internet" you really need to be pointing to a DNS server that syncs up with the root DNS servers approved by ICANN.
When does this get relevant? Well, when somebody disagrees about who owns a domain. It's nice that there are standard procedures for disputing these things. And remember when it used to cost some ungodly amount per year to register domains? Then along came OpenSRS and lots of registrars that pushed prices down, opening the web up to further colonization. This had to be approved and initiated by ICANN. The problem? ICANN already operates essentially without answering to any government or external authority, and the "citizens" of the Internet have no real voice in what goes on at ICANN. What if ICANN decides to go back to granting register.com a monopoly on new domain registrations? Well, they won't because the backlash would be huge, I imagine, but I am trying to give an example of what they theoretically could do.
Also little issues like the transition to IPv6 are governed to some extent by the ICANN, and that matters too - I for one would like my toaster and household appliances to have IP addresses in my frigging lifetime. I'm sure you can find more things the ICANN is responsible for at their website. Or do a Google search. Then tell me if you think maybe the users of the Internet who ultimately pay for its growth and the taxpayers of the nations that set up the original infrastructure for its growth ought to have some say in how it is managed.
Unfortunately, it's not a good idea nor is it going to happen. In fact, with the costs of IT workers so low right now, I have seen evidence of people moving away from the ASP model. Frankly, I believe there will always be a mix of outsourced IT development, in-house maintenance and development, and Application Service Providers (ASPs) who will fit in for appropriately commoditized applications.
The real world has a huge diversity of applications - most enterprise applications can't just be outsourced for maintenance, ongoing development and so-forth, unless by the people who developed it in the first place. Exodus and the many colocation facilities of the late 90s and early 00s wanted to offer services sort of like this, but it just doesn't work - they don't have the talent in shop to do it, and can't learn everybody else's apps.
If by "IT department" you mean IBM will operate databases, Apache web servers and J2EE app servers and other commodity applications in their own datacenters, then I do believe it, but again that is what a lot of high-service colos were doing several years back (many of whom went under). The economies of scale aren't there - the only people who would think they are are those who think of "IT" as some mythical blob of computer operators, and don't realize the mix of trained sysadmins, developers, and so-on that make up "IT".
And the ASP model - well, the problem there is that though the company that developed an app is well suited to actually host and operate the app, if a corporation adopts that model, then their apps will be hosted and operated all over hell and high water. I mean, this is fundamentally the web services model, and it's nice for a lot of things, but I don't think anybody believes it is going to make corporate IT departments go away and allow the centralization of all computing work into a big IBM datacenter. I'll believe that when I see it.
Agreed, I think some "meta conversation" could greatly improve Slashdot. I realize that/. will always be Rob Malda's playground and the editors can do whatever they please, but treating a community like their personal fiefdom has driven a lot of people away (to k5 and other places).
I am not saying that they should throw away their own principles or ideas or turn this into a democracy experiment, but really, open it up to discussion, see what ideas are well received in the threads and consider adopting at least some of them if they make sense.
Re:Perhaps I'm missing something but...
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Slashdot is Moving
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well, Exodus is a bankrupt colocation company. At least last I checked they were bankrupt. They apparently were acquired (at least their assets and such were acquired) by Cable and Wireless back in February. I had a friend whose company was bought by Exodus. Luckily he managed to sell some of his Exodus stock before they fell into the shitter.
Apparently some of their colo facilities must still be operated by Cable and Wireless - hope they aren't as empty as they were a year ago. I had some friends who went into an Exodus colo and said it looked like a ghost town at the time.
I decided to save you the effort of replying to this article by summarizing all of the posts you are about to make.
1) BSD is dead poster: BSD is dead! Only 13 people use OpenBSD and they all live in their parent's basements! 2) Dumb Karma Whore: Packet filtering? What's that? Can somebody explain why pf is a better packet filter than the alternatives? 3) De Raadt Hater: Theo sucks! Burn in hell, Theo, you self-righteous prick. FreeBSD 0wnz!
This is a fabulous idea. We are pretty good at organizing, very politically opinionated on certain issues that may not be of interest to the general population but affect all of our lives, and we have a rather high mean income, so we could all afford to give a bit of money.
Wait a second, isn't the EFF supposed to do this already? I guess the EFF spreads their efforts out a bit, and perhaps fails to focus strongly enough on the legislative branch, and lobbying Congress to pass bills more friendly to the technology community. The EFF seems to get stuck in the judicial process, relying on the admittedly somewhat more rights-friendly judiciary to save our asses. Frankly, I don't think the Free Software Foundation, which you mention, is the kind of organization I would want representing my point of view in the political arena, though I think they have done a lot of great work to promote Free Software. I think we could accomplish a lot with an organization that existed to promote legislation friendly to the cause of freedom online, that had a pro-Free Software stance without being radically dogmatic.
Re:what if it also installed it's source?
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First Worm with a EULA?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You are wrong. I have many friends who are lawyers or in law school, and I have had this discussion several times with some of them, though IANAL. Clearly, the GPL is a document, an agreement between the recipient and the author of a program, which grants a set of rights, provided a set of conditions are met. This is a classic contract - you are receiving something in exchange for some consideration. If you reject the terms (the consideration) than the contract is likely to be null and void (with certain exceptions - like promissory estoppel, though that is unlikely to ever occur in any GPL/Open Source or shrinkwrap software license disputes).
Of course, if the contract is null and void, you are still bound to the standard law regarding copyrighted material with respect to a GPL work. In other words, you can look at it, but you don't have any right to redistribute, modify, etc. etc. etc., all the nice rights that the GPL grants you THROUGH your acceptance of a contract, IN EXCHANGE FOR consideration. So it is clearly only possible as a result of BOTH copyright law and contract law that the GPL can exist. An EULA generally refers to a consumer good (a piece of binary software), that is also admittedly under copyright protection, and there is generally no "contract" that I think should be legally acceptable, because, as you point out, it restricts what you can do and offers you no consideration in return (though click-through licenses apparently offer you the consideration of being able to use software you already paid for - ROFL).
Summary: GPL depends on a combination of contract law and copyright law. Shrinkwrap EULAs depend on a serious misinterpretation of contract law to restrict rights that you have as a result of common law and copyright law (i.e. first sale doctrine, etc.). Clearly we can all agree that EULAs restrict freedoms, and most Free/Open Source Licenses, GPL included, grant rights you wouldn't otherwise have.
Yes, unfortunately, at the surface of it, this is a lawsuit based on a patent that WAS ISSUED by the USPTO. I am not sure if a lawsuit can be deemed frivolous just because the patent it is based on was frivolous. There seems to be very weak tie-in on this sort of issue in our judicial system. IANAL of course. It would be nice if SOMEBODY could be punished for applying for or issuing such FUCKING ABSURD patents, but right now, nobody gets held accountable, and nothing stops these people until they lose in court (the only way to actually prove that a patent is absurd due to prior art, or triviality of claims, etc.).
For many Americans, it's fine for an American to criticize Freedom of the Press in America. For a German or Frenchman? That's a little strong for some peoples' stomachs.
Keep in mind that neither France nor Germany would be democratic nations if it weren't for the US and the UK backed defeat of the Nazis. I know that sounds like an average dick-American thing to say, and I don't mean it in that way, but it is hard to be the "parent nation" of modern liberal democracy, and then to be told that even though it says so in your First Amendment, lots of small countries, and countries that you helped build are better at the basic democratic building blocks than you are. It's also easy for countries to criticize when *they* aren't under siege by radical Islamic terrorist organizations.
I frankly don't feel this way, though I do get infuriated by a lot of the US-bashing that goes on on Slashdot. Obviously the US is not a perfect country, but neither are any European countries. Clearly, we could do better in a lot of ways, and I consider myself an activist, as does much of the US-based/. community, against prior restraints on free speech, against outrageous intellectual property laws, and against monopolistic business practices. But the association of our points of view with loud, whiny, anti-American Euroweenies just drives away potential supporters of our points of view and makes our job harder.
With respect to my reaction to this survey, I am mostly saddened that we are ranked number 17. However, when I think about it more, I am heartened by the fact that democracy and freedom and in many ways furthered immensely by the Internet and technology that the US was in large part (not solely of course) responsible for creating. And the sorts of influences that likely impinge on Freedom of the Press such as corruption and the need for tough law enforcement (revealing sources and preventing journalists trespassing) are understandable given our unique circumstances (US is huge and diverse -> localized corruption, pressures on journalists, US is under siege by terrorists -> greater security precautions).
Slashdot Mirror
So it's reasonable to assume that people who are downloading over 180 hours of music a month are probably sharing their accounts, or something. Or just abusing the service. Downloading more music than a single person can conceivably listen to in a month is abusive. But anyway, why don't they just say "Download all the music you want, up to 10000 minutes of music a month!" instead of saying "unlimited". There will always be some who leach and seek to abuse the system - but no need to be dishonest, just state the limitations and expectations up front.
What GeekPAC needs is marketing. I hate to say it, but it's true. This needs to be wrapped up in some way that doesn't use the word "geek." I know, I can use the word to describe myself when I'm in a self-deprecating mode, but I don't think it will make a great impression on Congresspeople - imagine - "Congressman Smith, the geeks are hear to speak with you again." I mean, I know we as a community have taken the negative connotations of the word and tried to turn them around, but that's not reflected in the common understanding.
Maybe something like Technological Progress and Liberty PAC. Anything but GeekPAC.
I am just curious about this, since you can see from Katz' profile that he hasn't posted anything on Slashdot since April or May, and everybody seems to know he's gone, but I can't seem to find any stories or posts anywhere explaining the story behind his departure, or what he's doing now (no, it's not like I want to go read his drivel elsewhere, but I'm curious nonetheless).
And so I'm not completely offtopic - Film Gimp is great - wish more companies would invest money and time into customizing and improving open source tools and releasing them back to the public like this. This kind of contribution could really help some programs like the Gimp to go from niche programs for amateurs and non-serious work to serious professional workhorses.
Frankly, that kind of thing isn't good for humankind. I'm all for connectedness, but when we are so connected we lose our connections to the immediate world around us and the people right under our noses so we can email, check weather, and write code all the time - well, we truly lose some of what makes us human. And that's sad.
Yes, of course that's the same thing. When you put words along the lines of "Hit List" or "Top Ten Most Wanted Baby Killers" and have blood spattered images and check marks next to deceased doctors, don't you think the _context_ is a bit different? In the same way, yelling "Fire!" when you are alone in a forest is the same verbal intonation you might make in a crowded theater, yet one is an illegal act due to the context. Context is sometimes more important than content when it comes to first amendment jurisprudence, as it should be, since the same words can mean different things and result in VERY different consequences depending on when, how and where they are used.
Leaving it up to ISPs is nice, but the only reason any ISP would ever restrict anything is fear of civil or criminal lawsuits and preserving bandwidth. They don't give a rat's ass about social responsibility for its own sake. And there are things that SHOULDN'T be legal to publish on the web or anywhere (for example, hit lists of abortion providers that encourage murder and provide names and addresses to assist in the commission of a crime).
If Europe wants to make "hate speech" illegal, they should make clear what the exact standards are and how they still allow for reasonable debate and discussion of all issues. If the public feels those standards are appropriate for all forums of discussion, then they are within their rights to ban European servers and ISPs from carrying material in violation of their laws. Democracy is tyranny by the majority. I don't like it either, which is why I don't consider myself a democrat (little D).
Of course, even with the throttling set to 24kbps, it still looked like there was over 32kbps going upstream. I don't like being a leech, and I'd love to share some bandwidth to a reasonable degree, but with such tight limits on our upstream bandwidth, there's not much I can do. Also, my old strategy (when I wanted to play Counter-Strike or latency was being problematic, I'd just block port 1214 at our router) doesn't work any more because new versions of Kazaa do crazy port-hopping stuff to prevent being blocked. No choice but to disable it entirely.
I guess my point is that there is blame to go around here. Companies like Kazaa need to provide better throttling in P2P products (there is no way to throttle to less than 24kbps... that's fucking retarded) and need to ship with throttling enabled to avoid flooding networks. And ISPs should realize that blocking is retarded - it will just piss customers off. Bandwidth throttling is okay, but give us reasonable limits. My service shouldn't slow to a crawl just because I am using 24kbps of upstream (ATT Broadband), and my service shouldn't get disabled for 60 seconds because I open a lot of connections (Verizon DSL - doing a server refresh in Counter-Strike makes the connection throttle and then shut down after polling a couple thousand servers, and it won't come back to life for 60 seconds).
Crippling the software I choose to run is unacceptable, and if you do it, I will be forced to shop elsewhere.. err... you have a monopoly. I guess I'll just have to take it in the rumpelstiltskin. Never mind.
Now imagine a gorgeous woman having sex with you every night in your new, socially acceptable domicile. See what I'm talking about? That could be you. Just something to think about.
I know living in a geek-o-rama pigsty is cool and everything when you wanna have a Counter-Strike LAN party on your bare concrete floor, but you can be a geek and still have hygiene and a relatively normal residence, and those girlfriends will start banging down on your door. Then you won't need the 11 monitors and surround-sound pr0n.
You must work for Siemens - I've had friends who've worked there, and I've heard the stories. I'm sorry for you. :)
I hope I can get the source code to a Symbian and hack on it to improve the vibration modes, the "gooey" interface, and even make it go faster.
Oh, that's a Sybian. Never mind.
First, you are making a common error. You are making the assumption that the lack of integrated device drivers is a problem with linux as opposed to a problem with vendor support.
No, I'm not. It's not about out-of-the-box support. The problem is that EVERY driver requires a recompile with the kernel. For example, look at the Nvidia drivers. OEM distributed binary drivers won't work reliably across MINOR kernel versions without a recompile. This is unexcusable IMHO. Furthermore, I was only pointing this out as a roadblock to automated hardware detection/driver download from a centralized repository. Of course it's not reasonable to assume that any OS should ship supporting all hardware, but there's no reason I should have to manually download drivers, unless I want to use something other than the default driver for my hardware. Even Windows doesn't do this yet either, I agree, I usually (9 times out of 10) have to go to a (usually shitty) hardware vendor webpage to download drivers. Sucks, and it shouldn't work that way in an ideal world. That's all I'm saying here. Vendor support of hardware is another issue entirely, but that's a business issue not a technology issue.
Just so you understand, I'm not using Windows as the model of perfection here, just pointing out that Windows has some facilities in this area that are decent. Some Linux distros are great at autodetecting hardware (Mandrake for instance), but if you have some piece of hardware not shipped with the OS, it's MUCH more effort and less fundamentally automatable to get a driver installed and working for any arbitrary Linux distribution than it is for Windows, though I make no claim that either platform has such facilities built in currently.
You are also correct that the Windows driver facilities have some fundamentally broken "features" as well - requiring all those reboots is one of them. Linux is certainly much better in that respect.
I still think the Linux hardware model is broken. If you want to see why I think this way, look at the Mac OS X hardware abstractions and C++ driver model. It is SO much nicer than Linux. There is a stable contract/interface between the OS kernel and hardware drivers.
Agreed about organization strategies for data. When we move to a more semantic, knowledge-oriented representation of data, and use RDF to describe all our contacts, then perhaps the computer will get smart enough to suggest logical hierarchical representations of the data based on what it knows. Or at least so Tim Berners-Lee would have it.
In fact, I believe that the above is exactly why the OS DOES matter. A well designed, well written, well supported OS should make it seamless to interact with your hardware, should be able to automatically fetch drivers over the Internet (when a connection is present, and help set up a connection if none is available yet). Admittedly much of this functionality is part of the "Desktop Environment" and GUI, but it absolutely needs to be supported by the underlying platform. You can make the greatest Linux Desktop Environment ever, and you still won't get seamless hardware support no thanks to a flexible but ultimately inadequate driver model (and other issues).
Certainly the next logical step with the human-computer interface is higher levels of abstraction. That goes without saying. The problem is making a GUI that abstracts things in this way and still lets us get as much work done as efficiently as we currently do. In other words, it can't be frustrating or get in the way, which most attempts at new conceptware desktop environments have in the past. I mean, Palm OS does a great job at this honestly - while you do save and load data files, rarely do you ever see or even consider a "filesystem" per se on your PDA. When you want to take notes, you open the note application thingy, when you want to add new contacts or email, you open that.
The problem with this model is it works great for a device that you only expect to use to manage basic personal information and to function as a glorified organizer. It doesn't fly so well when we are talking about general purpose computing platforms.
It would be appropriate to note that this "crack" doesn't allow you to obtain free service, and that this has never been about free service. It's just about the ability to modify your Tivo, install cool things like TivoNet cards and so forth. Tivo keeps making this more difficult with every release. And each time it wears away a bit of community goodwill, which is sad because its this thriving community on which Tivo has built a business.
A better example might be buying a 2003 Ford Mustang, ripping off the exhaust and installing an aftermarket exhaust system for 2003 Ford Mustangs. If Ford says "but we sell our Mustangs at a loss, the EULA says you will buy parts and maintenance from Ford" you would tell them to go fuck themselves. Likewise when a hardware or software maker tells me what I can do with a product I legally purchased.
Well, I was working on the assumption that though he appeared to be a troll, there are always some people who don't know what the significance of the ICANN is. Furthermore, I didn't copy and paste anything - I just wrote off the top of my head what I know of the ICANN's responsibilities and relevance - like I said, I'm not an expert on the topic, but I've certainly dealt with some domain name problems in the past, enough to give me a healthy respect for the importance of ICANN to maintaining a fair and orderly Internet.
When does this get relevant? Well, when somebody disagrees about who owns a domain. It's nice that there are standard procedures for disputing these things. And remember when it used to cost some ungodly amount per year to register domains? Then along came OpenSRS and lots of registrars that pushed prices down, opening the web up to further colonization. This had to be approved and initiated by ICANN. The problem? ICANN already operates essentially without answering to any government or external authority, and the "citizens" of the Internet have no real voice in what goes on at ICANN. What if ICANN decides to go back to granting register.com a monopoly on new domain registrations? Well, they won't because the backlash would be huge, I imagine, but I am trying to give an example of what they theoretically could do.
Also little issues like the transition to IPv6 are governed to some extent by the ICANN, and that matters too - I for one would like my toaster and household appliances to have IP addresses in my frigging lifetime. I'm sure you can find more things the ICANN is responsible for at their website. Or do a Google search. Then tell me if you think maybe the users of the Internet who ultimately pay for its growth and the taxpayers of the nations that set up the original infrastructure for its growth ought to have some say in how it is managed.
The real world has a huge diversity of applications - most enterprise applications can't just be outsourced for maintenance, ongoing development and so-forth, unless by the people who developed it in the first place. Exodus and the many colocation facilities of the late 90s and early 00s wanted to offer services sort of like this, but it just doesn't work - they don't have the talent in shop to do it, and can't learn everybody else's apps.
If by "IT department" you mean IBM will operate databases, Apache web servers and J2EE app servers and other commodity applications in their own datacenters, then I do believe it, but again that is what a lot of high-service colos were doing several years back (many of whom went under). The economies of scale aren't there - the only people who would think they are are those who think of "IT" as some mythical blob of computer operators, and don't realize the mix of trained sysadmins, developers, and so-on that make up "IT".
And the ASP model - well, the problem there is that though the company that developed an app is well suited to actually host and operate the app, if a corporation adopts that model, then their apps will be hosted and operated all over hell and high water. I mean, this is fundamentally the web services model, and it's nice for a lot of things, but I don't think anybody believes it is going to make corporate IT departments go away and allow the centralization of all computing work into a big IBM datacenter. I'll believe that when I see it.
I am not saying that they should throw away their own principles or ideas or turn this into a democracy experiment, but really, open it up to discussion, see what ideas are well received in the threads and consider adopting at least some of them if they make sense.
I had a friend whose company was bought by Exodus. Luckily he managed to sell some of his Exodus stock before they fell into the shitter.
Apparently some of their colo facilities must still be operated by Cable and Wireless - hope they aren't as empty as they were a year ago. I had some friends who went into an Exodus colo and said it looked like a ghost town at the time.
Dear Slashdotters,
I decided to save you the effort of replying to this article by summarizing all of the posts you are about to make.
1) BSD is dead poster: BSD is dead! Only 13 people use OpenBSD and they all live in their parent's basements!
2) Dumb Karma Whore: Packet filtering? What's that? Can somebody explain why pf is a better packet filter than the alternatives?
3) De Raadt Hater: Theo sucks! Burn in hell, Theo, you self-righteous prick. FreeBSD 0wnz!
14% of the respondents did not care and the other 9% live in fear that they will be eaten by Hilary Rosen for music piracy.
Wait a second, isn't the EFF supposed to do this already? I guess the EFF spreads their efforts out a bit, and perhaps fails to focus strongly enough on the legislative branch, and lobbying Congress to pass bills more friendly to the technology community. The EFF seems to get stuck in the judicial process, relying on the admittedly somewhat more rights-friendly judiciary to save our asses. Frankly, I don't think the Free Software Foundation, which you mention, is the kind of organization I would want representing my point of view in the political arena, though I think they have done a lot of great work to promote Free Software. I think we could accomplish a lot with an organization that existed to promote legislation friendly to the cause of freedom online, that had a pro-Free Software stance without being radically dogmatic.
In the meantime, why not donate to EFF?
Of course, if the contract is null and void, you are still bound to the standard law regarding copyrighted material with respect to a GPL work. In other words, you can look at it, but you don't have any right to redistribute, modify, etc. etc. etc., all the nice rights that the GPL grants you THROUGH your acceptance of a contract, IN EXCHANGE FOR consideration. So it is clearly only possible as a result of BOTH copyright law and contract law that the GPL can exist. An EULA generally refers to a consumer good (a piece of binary software), that is also admittedly under copyright protection, and there is generally no "contract" that I think should be legally acceptable, because, as you point out, it restricts what you can do and offers you no consideration in return (though click-through licenses apparently offer you the consideration of being able to use software you already paid for - ROFL).
Summary: GPL depends on a combination of contract law and copyright law. Shrinkwrap EULAs depend on a serious misinterpretation of contract law to restrict rights that you have as a result of common law and copyright law (i.e. first sale doctrine, etc.). Clearly we can all agree that EULAs restrict freedoms, and most Free/Open Source Licenses, GPL included, grant rights you wouldn't otherwise have.
Yes, unfortunately, at the surface of it, this is a lawsuit based on a patent that WAS ISSUED by the USPTO. I am not sure if a lawsuit can be deemed frivolous just because the patent it is based on was frivolous. There seems to be very weak tie-in on this sort of issue in our judicial system. IANAL of course. It would be nice if SOMEBODY could be punished for applying for or issuing such FUCKING ABSURD patents, but right now, nobody gets held accountable, and nothing stops these people until they lose in court (the only way to actually prove that a patent is absurd due to prior art, or triviality of claims, etc.).
Keep in mind that neither France nor Germany would be democratic nations if it weren't for the US and the UK backed defeat of the Nazis. I know that sounds like an average dick-American thing to say, and I don't mean it in that way, but it is hard to be the "parent nation" of modern liberal democracy, and then to be told that even though it says so in your First Amendment, lots of small countries, and countries that you helped build are better at the basic democratic building blocks than you are. It's also easy for countries to criticize when *they* aren't under siege by radical Islamic terrorist organizations.
I frankly don't feel this way, though I do get infuriated by a lot of the US-bashing that goes on on Slashdot. Obviously the US is not a perfect country, but neither are any European countries. Clearly, we could do better in a lot of ways, and I consider myself an activist, as does much of the US-based
With respect to my reaction to this survey, I am mostly saddened that we are ranked number 17. However, when I think about it more, I am heartened by the fact that democracy and freedom and in many ways furthered immensely by the Internet and technology that the US was in large part (not solely of course) responsible for creating. And the sorts of influences that likely impinge on Freedom of the Press such as corruption and the need for tough law enforcement (revealing sources and preventing journalists trespassing) are understandable given our unique circumstances (US is huge and diverse -> localized corruption, pressures on journalists, US is under siege by terrorists -> greater security precautions).
Okay, now flame away at me. You know you want to.