This claim is NOT rhetoric. I am describing a group of people (far leftists) with whom I had an agonizing amount of interaction in my four years as an undergrad at Harvard. They generally refuse to make moral judgements that violate the cultural guilt that's been created in them through intellectual trends in late twentieth century society such as political correctness.
They criticize the US for reasons that I cannot fathom. They are NOT making a moral criticism of the US, however, since they fail to apply the same standard to other countries. It's more of a criticism of people who have power, what they perceive as rebelliousness or anti-authoritarianism.
A moral relativist technically is somebody who equates morality with cultural standards and denies the existance of an absolute right and wrong. Anybody who is an apologist for terrorists is most likely a moral relativist, or a pacifist, which is essentially the same thing. If force has EVER been justified, this is the time (post September 11th). And if you deny that there is anything worth fighting and dying for, you are not applying a consistent moral framework to the world around you. Thus you are a moral relativist.
Chomsky's judgements, while consistently opposed to the US, represent an activist point of view, but do not represent a fundamentally moral point of view. They are not really Collectivist, they are not Utilitarian, they are not Socialist, they are not Libertarian. They are just vehement rhetoric.
Call me what you will, I don't spew rhetoric, I do however disagree with (some) of what Chomsky says, in fact, I'd say everything he says related to foreign policy. And in general, I disagree with the intellectual movement which he affiliates himself, because they do not consistently apply a standard of morality that I have ever heard explained in their analyses. I don't claim to have read everything or even much of Chomsky's writing, and maybe he has some more intellectual pieces out there, but flailing your arms and claiming the US kills millions of people everywhere all the time is patently absurd, and I will continue to judge Chomsky as such until I see evidence to the contrary. If you have any records of anything GOOD and well reasoned that he's written, please post a link, I'd love to read it and rethink my opinion of him.
Note that I don't think that all liberals are anything, or anything of the sort. I consider myself a political moderate, but I am very, very insistent that we rely on reason and logic and facts in coming to political decisions.
I do not ignore your arguments until you prove yourself to be a non-credible witness to factuality. As soon as you start throwing around falsehoods and refusing to listen to reason, I reject your arguments.
Furthermore, if you accept moral relativism, I can judge up front that you are intellectually weak, because this point of view has been thoroughly rejected by philosophers, academics, and anybody who accepts reason and logic. This reduces your standing, but doesn't mean I will ignore your arguments. It means facts you provide aren't credible until I see them backed by a more trustworthy authority. It means I assume your arguments are based on the same set of assumptions (which I reject) that come from people with a similar bent to your own, and I will approach them accordingly.
He makes up facts, and cites figures that are false. He buys into and furthers the position of radical left wing organizations that a) accept moral relativism as a guiding principle and b) have no particular attachment to "facts", "reality" or anything resembling logic or evidence.
Basically, this guy is full of shit and spews rhetoric to surround his bullshit so it will appeal more strongly to his target audience of impressionable, idealistic left wing college kids.
I would point out that Chomsky is a smart guy, linguist, philologist, whatever. Like many Slashdotters, though, his intelligence does not lead to a sensible or logical understanding of politics - he starts spewing poop out of his mouth when he talks about anything resembling politics or international relations, which he seems all too willing to do. It really discredits his work as an academic and intellectual, which is otherwise quite good.
First of all, others have already pointed out that quoting Noam Chomsky, who while a very bright fellow, doesn't seem to be generally attached to "facts" or "reality" when it comes to furthering him own radical political agenda, does not serve your argument very well, and makes you look biased by association with such a fellow.
Chomsky and his ilk are not popular here on Slashdot - for good reason. The overall Slashdot political mix is, well, mixed, but most techie types tend to be of the rationalist variety, whichever side they fall on. They like to rely on rational analysis of facts to come to conclusions, rather than the usual technique of far right and far left wingers of making the facts fit your own view of the world (think Creationists, think Chomsky, think radical Corporatists, etc.).
Anyway, that stuff aside, you raise some decent points. It's pretty clear that there was more to Somalia than just a humanitarian mission to distribute food, and it comes off very badly when we are dishonest about our motivations for going to war. Yes, sometimes resources critical to our national wellbeing ARE worth going to war over. Unfortunately, oil IS currently a critical piece of our economy, until we figure out a workaround for that (i.e. fuel cell powered vehicles combined with efficient fusion, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric power generation on large scales).
Nevertheless, I don't think your characterizations of people who resent the Arab world and the Islamist movements are at all accurate. In fact, radical Islamists share quite a bit in common with Chomsky and the far left wing of our own country. For one thing, you are supposed to accept their principles on faith, and reason never enters into the equation (don't get me wrong, the far right is largely the same). I say this because the far left is largely characterized by reliance on Moral Relativism and a retreat to an intellectually weak stance in which one refuses to acknowledge that some moral systems are based on logic, reason, and the common good and some are based on arbitrary systems of faith that do not promote maximal Utility by any sort of reality-based perception.
I'm not saying the US government is perfect. I really wish we would be honest about our motivations for actions in Somalia and elsewhere (Gulf War). But come on, you have to be stupid ultimately if you didn't realize what it was all about. Just do some background reading. And for the rest of the sheeple in the US, they are happier just thinking of these things in simpler terms anyway, and can't deal with the morally grey areas of international politics.
I will conclude with this: I can not condone arbitrary agression by the US government against foreign regimes, but I do believe that if such a regime is acting in a way that harms our people's interests, then it is our government's fiduciary responsibility as our representative to the international community to take action. Each government is responsible to exactly the set of its own people and its own country. However, if "the interests of it's people" gets reinterpreted as "increasing profits by certain monopolistic or cartel organizations based in the country that feed kickbacks to politicians", I agree we have a problem, but I believe that problem is better solved through reform of campaign and political finance legislation than by left wing rhetoric about how much we should care about how many thousands of Somalis died (who were trying to kill US soldiers, and therefore got the logical result they could have expected).
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware
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Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Very interesting post - I agree that Gtk and Qt are probably culprits for not properly playing nice with X Windows and its rules. I think part of the problem is the fact that there never seems to have been any coherent work done on this. The windowing system oriented people who work on X say "the toolkit authors fault". The toolkit authors would say "it's your drivers or the limitations of X Windows".
While I do appreciate the flexibility of X Windows, I honestly DON'T think the windowing system and toolkits should be these totally orthogonal projects, and the toolkits just "draw as they see fit" on a canvas that they expect the windowing system to render dumbly. This is the X model, inherited from the dumb terminal days. I have had this argument out several other times here on/., I am not a newbie or a moron, and I AM a professional software executive with over 8 years of programming experience (though admittedly not writing windowing systems or toolkits).
I certainly believe firmly in the benefits of choice and competition, and agree with most/.ers on that. I just don't think that the toolkit is the right place for it. Linux is competition for Windows. Berlin (could be) competition for X (someday). But Gnome/Gtk and KDE/Qt as competing toolkits, desktop environments, etc. that are totally decoupled from the Windowing system? It should honestly be enough to have competing apps built on the same toolkit. A somewhat similar aesthetic for the desktop.
I appreciate what X Windows does for us, I just don't think it's the right solution for a desktop operating environment. Because of all the X apps out there, I think anything that comes out needs X compatibility as a backwards compatible route, but I don't feel that we should look to X Windows for the future. Just my opinion.
This is a serious case of faulty analysis, if anybody thinks this is evidence that crypto export restrictions ever were or could be effective. While it is true that forcing the default shipments of much software to 40-bit does make getting strong crypto a _conscious_ decision and require a small, but definite output of effort, to find and download a secure solution (in your country of choice), the people most likely to put forth this effort are those who need it.
Who needs it? Well, businesses, anybody with information they want to keep private, anybody with information they don't want their bosses or employers to know, anybody who keeps secret information or documents that they don't want wife/children/family/parents to pry into, people with mistresses, and yes, perhaps some really bad people like terrorists.
The fact that one already acknowledged to be EXTREMELY incompetent terrorist who failed to successfully ignite his shoe bomb (which was packed with high explosive) ALSO failed to properly obtain a high security add-on for his computer is evidence of exactly one thing: his incompetence. Not of the effectiveness of export restrictions. So while I agree that perhaps investigators obtained useful information because he was using weak encryption, and that is fortunate, export restrictions would not prevent a determined, modestly informed criminal or criminal organization from using real crypto (as opposed to 40 bit crippleware).
You could argue that a really determined criminal could take down a plane too. That's probably true, but we're talking about levels of effort on different orders of magnitude here. One involves 5 minutes and a few clicks on a computer. The other involves serious tactical planning to commit a terrorist act. Conclusion: crypto export restrictions have never protected us from a competent criminal, and they still cause economic harm by restricting free trade of goods that support proper encryption by US companies, giving unfair advantage to foreign companies.
Wrong. If license terms say "We will eat your third born son. Consent to this term is implied by clicking on the "I Accept this License" button." then they are unenforceable because they infringe on a right that is held to be fundamental. For the same reason, you cannot sell yourself into slavery in the US, no matter how much money somebody offers you or how airtight the contract is - because the contract is fundamentally illegal or treads on rights that are held to be more fundamental than your right to enter into a contract.
Furthermore, there OUGHT to be substantially more limitations on what rights can be given up by a "click-through" style "license" or an implicit license like the GPL, BSD, or any other usual software license (obviously, enterprise software contracts between companies are different as they usually hold the signatures of representatives/executives from both companies and are substantially more legally binding).
I don't believe a click-through license should be able to give up rights to jury trial (see Borland Kylix license article from yesterday), because right to settlement by jury trial is a fundamental right in our society. Likewise, with the right to privacy and Borland's license term that lets them search your premises for license infringements at their leisure. I believe that a license that gives up the latter right should probably require physical signature by both parties, and I believe the former term (giving up right to jury trial settlement) should be illegal, period. And chances are a lot of courts would agree with me.
If we accept this point of view, then we can probably acknowledge that there are real limitations to the kinds of restrictions that a license such as the GPL can place on its licensees. However, the interesting and VERY important difference here is that in the case of the GPL, you are licensing the Copyrighted work for modification and redistribution. This is a right you don't have at all without the GPL, though it's conceivable that it could be ruled that parts of the GPL are "severable" in the sense that the restrictive clauses don't hold up but the distribution clauses do. This would be a very Bad Thing, of course, were it to happen, since it would violate the intentions of implicit contracts that thousands and thousands of people have entered into by working on GPLed projects. I am not the hugest GPL fan myself, but I don't want the rights of those who have released software under the GPL tromped upon.
A click through license that seeks to limit _external_ rights, rather than grant rights of redistribution or modification of the copyrighted work, is in my opinion, substantially more legally suspect, especially without the legal contract signature. I don't understand how a court could ever rule that such clauses could bind a person and that a person could give up rights _outside_ of the copyright protections already enjoyed by the author of the software they are using. IANAL, but I still hold that this sort of thing will eventually be struck down when a half-way competent lawyer takes it before the courts, UCITA or no UCITA, it's a matter of constitutionality when the license clauses get this outrageous.
Ah I see what you mean about IPC. I agree fully that some sort of interprocess communication is needed. I am not suggesting that it should be. I think that there are more efficient ways to get true network transparency than what X provides, but they involve assuming that toolkits, fonts, etc. are common across the involved machines. I don't think this is such a bad thing to do. Call me strange, I know my point of view differs from many others here.
If your last point is true, then you have nothing to worry about. I'm just proposing an alternative to X windows. Why is it so damned great that we have Gtk, Xt, and so much toolkit diversity but when I propose an alternative to X Windows everyone shits their pants?
Frankly, the result would be a lot more than nothing. Go use Mac OS X. Tell me that you prefer using X Windows on Linux. If that is the case, then I encourage you to ignore me and my ranting, and I will tell you that you are blind and are not helping bring Linux to the desktop.
Agreed. I regret some of the tone of my original comment with regards to network transparency - I think network transparency is very useful and I DO use it quite frequently. However, I don't like the local performance of XFree86. While I should have made it extremely clear in my original post that I realize that XFree86 running locally does not have any network overhead per se, architecturally the X window design is made to support very dumb terminals - part of the inheritance from the era when X was originally designed.
Anyway, I do think network transparency, in a secure fashion, should be PART of the windowing system. What I should have said was I don't think network transparency HAS to be done the way X does it, and there is perhaps a different approach to it where more work is done on the client (X server) side.
You may be entirely correct about Mozilla and it sucking at handling certain events. I haven't tried using a preemptible kernel patch, but I imagine that might help alot with responsiveness. And I understand why OS X is good. I am just saying that there's no reason to give up on Free Software producing something equally good. But this isn't just about the implementation, this is about the system design and architecture. XFree86 is an implementation of the X Consortium standard/X11 protocol. OS X is actually designed and architected as a new desktop windowing system and operating environment. I think you are comparing apples and oranges there - that's my entire point. And I was never trying to put down the XFree86 team or a lot of the great work they have done, just saying that I think that something better than XFree86+Gtk/Qt+Gnome/KDE is possible.
I open emacs windows on my desktop at work all the time. I recognize fully the value of a network enabled windowing protocol to accomplish this. However your assertion that "99% of X-Window terminals don't run on desktops" is outrageous. Though I open emacs windows at work, at least 90-95% of the windows on my desktop are generally local to my own system. I would imagine that is the case for the majority of users. Furthermore, the ENTIRE point here is all about Linux on the desktop. If you don't want Linux on the desktop, fine, you don't have to worry about this. I am NOT telling you to uninstall emacs and X Windows from the server boxes at your company. I am simply saying that I don't believe we should limit ourselves to X Windows as the be-all-and-end-all of Linux on the desktop. Hell, at work I have an X server running on Windows 2000 so I can pop up remote emacs windows. This is a perfectly fine solution for me and for lots of people that lets us use X when we need it without using it exclusively on our desktop.
Monopoly is not good. I am letting the desktop evolve. In fact I am encouraging it. However, consistency and aesthetics and usability are also good for a desktop environment. If you don't want those features, then continue using X Windows. I am hardly trying to stop you from using the tool you like - but don't insist that I have to use it too.
I have certainly heard of LBX. I think that's a great idea. I don't think it addresses the fact that I think that the approach X Windows takes is fundamentally wrong, though.
I am hardly trying to knock the immense efforts of the XFree86 team, and I am trying to do more than just "bitching". I am hoping to rally people who feel the same way I do and engage in intelligent discourse. Perhaps I'll be convinced otherwise, but it hasn't happened yet. Anybody else's effort at making a working windowing system would invariably involve borrowing a lot of ideas, code, or other stuff from the XFree86 team. I use XFree86, and I don't blame the XFree86 team for the problems endemic to the X11 protocol itself, since they didn't design it. I just think that X11 is long in the tooth. It was great at the time it came about, XFree86 made Linux a usable modern operating system. That doesn't mean we should look no further and deny the problems that have cropped up over the years and the shortcomings of the architecture of an old system.
You are correct, it uses Unix domain sockets, I believe. Nevertheless, the architecture of X server, X client, and where the rendering gets done and who draws the pixels on the screen assume that the client (i.e. the X Windows app) does the rendering, and the X Server is a dumb terminal that renders them to the screen as a bunch of pixels.
This basic architecture is not ideal, in my opinion, for a desktop windowing system. I am not saying that there is network overhead when running on the same system. I am saying that X11 sucks because it was architected as a dumb-video-terminal windowing system rather than as a proper desktop windowing system.
I believe that network transparency should be achieved at a higher level, which means assuming more than a dumb video terminal. Larger functional blocks of information, less chattiness, that leaves more of the rendering to the "client" (what is called an X server in the insanity that is the X11 protocol), so that, for example, fonts could be rendered in the more sensible location.
So I don't believe that X11 achieves the _correct_ or _desireable_ form of network transparency for a _desktop windowing system_, though it's a nice backup capability to have, and I don't think X11 will or should go away anytime soon.
X Windows runs fine over 10bT. I said over the Internet. While the X protocol isn't very bandwidth intensive, it degrades rapidly with latency because it's fairly chatty (see for comparison Windows Terminal Server - I hate to say it, but it does a much better job at this - and I hate Windows, in general).
Most apps that just involve pixel painting (like an emu type thing) will probably run in comparable speed, since the overhead in blitting pixels to the screen is presumably not in and of itself huge. However, see something like Mozilla, for example. Try moving the window around on and off screen. Watch the redraw of the window when it moves back on screen. Awfully slow, I must say. GUI responsiveness in general is not great in X. I mean, it's not terrible - MUCH better than it used to be on older hardware.
In any case, you missed the entire point of my post, since it wasn't all about the performance of X Windows. Performance wise, X windows is adequate for what it does. Not terrible - but like I said, not great. This is subjective.
Frankly, X windows is on par speed-wise with OS X (subjectively - I'm not comparing them on identical hardware), but what matters is that OS X is aesthetically much more pleasing, renders fonts beautifully, supports transparency and anti-aliasing, and the other nice things that DPS gets you. If you can get all that nicely integrated into your windowing system rather than having them as kludgy strap-ons, and at comparable performance, why not go for it?
I am not forcing the user of the GUI to be anything. I am saying that a desktop windowing system is different from a multipurpose-network thin client windowing system, which is really what X is (err... thin X server... oh well, never mind). X assumes a dumb terminal that renders pixels as its told to. This is fine if that's what you want. What I want is a windowing system designed rationally for the 99% usage case, which is running apps locally on my desktop. Adding an X server to that is not too hard (see OroborOSX and rootless X11 support on OS X for an example).
I'm sorry, I don't really understand your argument. I don't really think that "network transparency" should be part of the architecture of a desktop windowing environment at all, so I don't see what this has to do with security. When you are allowing remote apps to run on other desktops, yes, a security mechanism needs to be in place. X is slower in terms of putting pixels onto screen than any other modern desktop windowing system (i.e. Windows, Mac OS X, etc.). As in I can see Mozilla redrawing when I drag a window, even with a blazing processor, and blazing graphics card.
With regards to "advantage of internal support for vector fonts", the advantage is that all apps would just say "draw these letters to the screen with these fonts" and the anti-aliasing, etc. would happen internally. Now, only apps written to the XRender extension do that. This means some apps support anti-aliasing, some don't. This makes my desktop ugly as sin. Also there are two parallel font management systems. This is a nightmare.
OS X DOES support legacy X11 applications, since you can run XFree86 in rootless mode under Mac OS X. It's just that they are heinous looking compared to Aqua apps.:) I am not opposed to this kind of solution, and I'm not saying X doesn't have its uses, I'm just saying we CAN do better.
As for your comments about DPS and the fact that OS X uses DPS as well, I am aware of that. If you are saying we could use X11 with DPS, I suppose that is true, but that seems like yet another awful hack to me. Why not just make something new and better (DPS based or otherwise) and support X11 as an add-on, or for backwards compatibility with legacy X11 apps?
Again, I point out that X11 is a piece of turd. There is no reason that we should accept the X Window system as sacrosanct. Why does X insist that a font is a 1 bit bitmap? Why is X written for network transparent operation when 99% of the usage of a desktop windowing system is local (I'm not knocking the feature, just saying it shouldn't be the central assumption of a desktop windowing system)? Why do the features necessary end up getting strapped on like XRender in a way that leaves us with two parallel font management systems for different types of X Windows apps? While everyone agrees that diversity and choice are good, do we really need so many different widget set and toolkits, all of which are separately themeable, resulting in the most heinous looking clash of aesthetics when Qt, Gtk, and Xaw apps are used simultaneously? Why is transparency and alpha blending on the client end totally impossible in X windows? Why is X Windows so damned chatty that it blows over the internet anyway?
While X windows is mature, and supports a lot of features, and represents (unfortunately) the repository of the vast majority of the current video support for Linux (if all the drivers for video support weren't in X land, perhaps we'd have better X Windows alternatives), that does NOT mean it is the best solution and that people shouldn't be trying to come up with something better.
Sorry, this is just not true. X11 sucks. There are lots of strapped on extensions that make it suck. Writing more won't help. We need a better windowing system, rewritten from scratch for desktop use, that supports network operation without sacrificing speed, that supports transparency and vector fonts internally, that includes a widget set/toolkit as part of the windowing system.
Just because nobody has done it yet (the only ones you point to who really tried are the Berlin folks, and they've just never had their act together, but have a lot of good concepts).
Just look at OS X for proof that your argument is entirely irrational.
I like the general approach. While GNOME and KDE are nice, I don't think either of them does it for me, or anybody with a more aesthetic view of the world. Go use OS X for a while, and try going back to GNOME or KDE. You will feel a serious sense of loss. Same goes for Windows, frankly.
I like the Linux core, I enjoy and am comfortable with Linux as a kernel and the GNU/Linux combo as an OS. I want a better GUI on top of it that pleases my aesthetic sense, makes my life easier when I want it to be easier, doesn't feature at least two separate tracks of font management systems, lots of apps of massively disjoint look-and-feel and more widget toolkits than I care to think about. In other words, Simply GNUStep is a good move, but why don't we consider dropping the X windows? Furthermore, why don't we consider taking this a step further? Hell, OS X took the old NextStep stuff and improved it dramatically. Why don't we do the same, and not be constrained by OS X or attempt to parrot or copy it, and see if we can improve on it?
I agree that source level compatibility with OS X is a nice feature at this point in time since lots of Cocoa apps are being written (primarily because OS X is doing so well), and I like the *Step environments. But I'd like to see some innovation from the Open Source world too.
What's odd about this is the fact that they put USB there. A USB Ethernet adapter can handle all of 10Mbit ethernet - no 100 Mbit ethernet here. I have two Tivo's currently, and have a 10MBit ethernet card in my SA (Standalone Tivo) and it is honestly slow as ass to transfer a show over to my desktop. But that's an ISA adapter hack with an old ISA 10baseT card in it - the Real Deal ought to include a 100baseT built in ethernet to stream big movies.
While it's true that for streaming over the internet directly from a Tivo it wouldn't matter, but it's pretty crazy to go around transferring full bitrate MPEG encoded movies - what most people want to be able to do is download video to their computer and re-encode or shrink it down to a reasonable archiveable size.
This sketches me out - I have a strange feeling that something is going on behind the scenes here - remember the flap over the ReplayTV that could "share movies with your friends". Tivo is a saavy company when it comes to placating the media world. I have a feeling there is a reason they are putting USB on it rather than ethernet directly. But it doesn't quite click to me what it could be - other than that this allows them to assess the industry response to it, and choose to release or not release official ethernet-USB support at a later date without endangering the product itself, and surely some hackers will make ethernet work anyway to appeal to the gear head crowd.
So I think this is a carefully considered business decision. I also know a lot of folks in the Tivo community and have no doubt that within weeks of these things hitting the stores all sorts of cool unintended uses for these USB ports will be thought up. I'll be first in line to buy one, as soon as the DirecTV-integrated version is out.
I have one of these chairs in my offices. Ya know what? I bought it myself, because the chairs our company is willing to fork over for suck. And a lot of people are satisfied with the 100-150 dollar chairs we have in the offices. Those of us with bad backs or who work long hours and aren't satisfied fork out for more ergonomics. What's wrong with that solution? Just insist that you get paid enough that the 800 bucks for an Aeron doesn't break your personal bank.
Bullshit. A direct manager often gets forced into things. It all depends on the exact nature of the organization.
Though you are right that the "I like you buddy, it's just my boss..." thing is a commonly used bit that is full of crap, that is generally only pulled on somebody at the meeting where they get canned. Assuming there are third parties to corroborate that in fact there is an "upper level" fellow badmouthing you, it certainly can happen.
Whether the Director is justified or correct or not is another question entirely - but it's within believability that such a fellow would try to pressure/build up a case against a lower level (non-direct report) employee who really rubbed them the wrong way. Our 20 year old sysadmin probably means well, but may have shitty social skills and may not have realized that he alienated someone important.
Dude, you are way off base. His point was that the contract is for direct service from the people who wrote the product, rather than having twenty layers of incompetent intermediaries. Most of us don't need somebody to come onsite within four hours to sit there until our ego is assuaged. We just want our systems admins to have the support they need from competent people for the products they use.
From my personal experience, the support I've gotten from proprietary software vendors who my company has paid 50-75k for software licenses and support to was basically crap (I'm thinking of BEA software here). It took them months to fix compliance issues with Weblogic Server 5.1 - they don't get released until the next patch. My experiences with JBoss Application Server have been far better, with much better support available.
So if what you want is hand-holding or training or full time on site service contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can get that mostly from large services firms no matter what sort of software you are talking about. If what you are talking about is top notch, fast response from the actual developers who are responsible for building the product, then his point is a service contract will help support an Open Source project and get you better support than you would get from an equivalent proprietary software company.
This is very 1999. Back several years ago I was looking at several colocation facilities for my company, including Frontier GlobalCenter in NYC and the Exodus data center in Waltham, MA. They spent so much money on whiz-bang protection from invading armed forces, etc. etc. Not to mention the slick electrically opaque glass between the conference room and the NOC, so they can press a button and you watch the "opaque" glass at the end of the room fade away to see the ridiculous NOC with way too many flashing lights and screens with little bandwidth bars that was all for the benefit of potential customers.
This sort of excess overspending and the lack of emphasis put on _real_ security (i.e. data security rather than physical security) ignores the vastly more likely threat to most company's web servers and database servers (and frankly that's what most of the boxen in these places are - huge rooms full of Yahoo and eBay machines). I'm not saying that a certain degree of security isn't appropriate, but withstanding foreign invasion? Please. The invaders are looking to break in with their armored brigade to the Exodus data center!!! Oh no!! Come on. A modest degree of armed guard presence, a low profile, some generators and massive UPS system - fine, this all makes sense. But you can go overboard.
Anyway, don't take my word for it. Just look at Exodus' stock. Their excesses seemed to ignore the fact that the service they provided just wasn't worth the outrageous amount of money they were charging for it, and these days, the more budget conscious hosting/data center/colo companies are the ones left standing.
Sorry, you are just being moronic. The ISPs market their offering as Internet Access. If they can't deliver on that, they WILL go out of business. If their business is based on a maximal usage of bandwidth, they need to be honest about it, and make that an up front part of their offering. I will just go use another provider. What generates bad will with customers is changing the contract with them arbitrarily when they signed up for X and agreed to pay Y dollars a month for it, then you arbitrarily start delivering X-C.
Any provider that does this to me will discover they have one less customer very rapidly. Don't advertise 150k/second if what you mean is 150k/second burst rate and an average usage rate of no more than 2k/second.
I have gotta give credit to Peter Jackson, his adaptation does a brilliant job at appealing largely to a fairly broad audience without completely alienating long time Tolkien fans. I see a lot of posts here and there on/. with various Minor Quibbles about plotline, or for some "Unforgiveable Sins" of the movie, but most of us (and I'm sure the vast majority of posters in this thread have read the books) seem to have generally positive feelings about this movie. At the same time, IMDB, although skewed as a metric of the general population, at least indicates that the broader online population seems to be responding well to the movie. Likewise, box office figures and the frigging 2 hours it took to find a theater in NYC where it wasn't sold out indicates to me it's doing well with quite a broad audience indeed.
This gives great credit to anybody - adapting a work of such linguistic depth and complexity, with so many characters and so much plot, even into a 9 hour trilogy of movies is not easy, and though we don't all agree with all the storyline cuts and modifications, these people deserve the money they are making from the film for such a good job done.
However, while you are reading, let me give my two cents of things I didn't like, cinematically and directorially about this movie: the atrocious use of music in gaudy fashion, trying to push audience emotions around to make up for mediocre acting in some scenes. It was just overdone - music is fine and necessary, but in a good movie you should barely notice it, unless it's really appropriate in a scene. In LoTR:FoTR I noticed it on several occasions, and in a bad way and it made my cheese-factor detector kick into high gear. The other thing that greatly diminished the experience for me was the overly sappy filming of the scenes at the end of the movie. Elijah Wood is not a great, emotive actor. Long face shots of him with tears flowing trying to look like he is distraught are just not engaging in cinematic form. I saw the audience squirming in their seats in the last 3-4 minutes of the movie last night (the second time I was seeing the movie by the way). While you can't change the division of the movie into three parts and keep to the book, you have to do the best you can to at least make the ending _feel_ more engaging.
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They criticize the US for reasons that I cannot fathom. They are NOT making a moral criticism of the US, however, since they fail to apply the same standard to other countries. It's more of a criticism of people who have power, what they perceive as rebelliousness or anti-authoritarianism.
A moral relativist technically is somebody who equates morality with cultural standards and denies the existance of an absolute right and wrong. Anybody who is an apologist for terrorists is most likely a moral relativist, or a pacifist, which is essentially the same thing. If force has EVER been justified, this is the time (post September 11th). And if you deny that there is anything worth fighting and dying for, you are not applying a consistent moral framework to the world around you. Thus you are a moral relativist.
Chomsky's judgements, while consistently opposed to the US, represent an activist point of view, but do not represent a fundamentally moral point of view. They are not really Collectivist, they are not Utilitarian, they are not Socialist, they are not Libertarian. They are just vehement rhetoric.
Call me what you will, I don't spew rhetoric, I do however disagree with (some) of what Chomsky says, in fact, I'd say everything he says related to foreign policy. And in general, I disagree with the intellectual movement which he affiliates himself, because they do not consistently apply a standard of morality that I have ever heard explained in their analyses. I don't claim to have read everything or even much of Chomsky's writing, and maybe he has some more intellectual pieces out there, but flailing your arms and claiming the US kills millions of people everywhere all the time is patently absurd, and I will continue to judge Chomsky as such until I see evidence to the contrary. If you have any records of anything GOOD and well reasoned that he's written, please post a link, I'd love to read it and rethink my opinion of him.
Note that I don't think that all liberals are anything, or anything of the sort. I consider myself a political moderate, but I am very, very insistent that we rely on reason and logic and facts in coming to political decisions.
Furthermore, if you accept moral relativism, I can judge up front that you are intellectually weak, because this point of view has been thoroughly rejected by philosophers, academics, and anybody who accepts reason and logic. This reduces your standing, but doesn't mean I will ignore your arguments. It means facts you provide aren't credible until I see them backed by a more trustworthy authority. It means I assume your arguments are based on the same set of assumptions (which I reject) that come from people with a similar bent to your own, and I will approach them accordingly.
Basically, this guy is full of shit and spews rhetoric to surround his bullshit so it will appeal more strongly to his target audience of impressionable, idealistic left wing college kids.
I would point out that Chomsky is a smart guy, linguist, philologist, whatever. Like many Slashdotters, though, his intelligence does not lead to a sensible or logical understanding of politics - he starts spewing poop out of his mouth when he talks about anything resembling politics or international relations, which he seems all too willing to do. It really discredits his work as an academic and intellectual, which is otherwise quite good.
Chomsky and his ilk are not popular here on Slashdot - for good reason. The overall Slashdot political mix is, well, mixed, but most techie types tend to be of the rationalist variety, whichever side they fall on. They like to rely on rational analysis of facts to come to conclusions, rather than the usual technique of far right and far left wingers of making the facts fit your own view of the world (think Creationists, think Chomsky, think radical Corporatists, etc.).
Anyway, that stuff aside, you raise some decent points. It's pretty clear that there was more to Somalia than just a humanitarian mission to distribute food, and it comes off very badly when we are dishonest about our motivations for going to war. Yes, sometimes resources critical to our national wellbeing ARE worth going to war over. Unfortunately, oil IS currently a critical piece of our economy, until we figure out a workaround for that (i.e. fuel cell powered vehicles combined with efficient fusion, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric power generation on large scales).
Nevertheless, I don't think your characterizations of people who resent the Arab world and the Islamist movements are at all accurate. In fact, radical Islamists share quite a bit in common with Chomsky and the far left wing of our own country. For one thing, you are supposed to accept their principles on faith, and reason never enters into the equation (don't get me wrong, the far right is largely the same). I say this because the far left is largely characterized by reliance on Moral Relativism and a retreat to an intellectually weak stance in which one refuses to acknowledge that some moral systems are based on logic, reason, and the common good and some are based on arbitrary systems of faith that do not promote maximal Utility by any sort of reality-based perception.
I'm not saying the US government is perfect. I really wish we would be honest about our motivations for actions in Somalia and elsewhere (Gulf War). But come on, you have to be stupid ultimately if you didn't realize what it was all about. Just do some background reading. And for the rest of the sheeple in the US, they are happier just thinking of these things in simpler terms anyway, and can't deal with the morally grey areas of international politics.
I will conclude with this: I can not condone arbitrary agression by the US government against foreign regimes, but I do believe that if such a regime is acting in a way that harms our people's interests, then it is our government's fiduciary responsibility as our representative to the international community to take action. Each government is responsible to exactly the set of its own people and its own country. However, if "the interests of it's people" gets reinterpreted as "increasing profits by certain monopolistic or cartel organizations based in the country that feed kickbacks to politicians", I agree we have a problem, but I believe that problem is better solved through reform of campaign and political finance legislation than by left wing rhetoric about how much we should care about how many thousands of Somalis died (who were trying to kill US soldiers, and therefore got the logical result they could have expected).
While I do appreciate the flexibility of X Windows, I honestly DON'T think the windowing system and toolkits should be these totally orthogonal projects, and the toolkits just "draw as they see fit" on a canvas that they expect the windowing system to render dumbly. This is the X model, inherited from the dumb terminal days. I have had this argument out several other times here on
I certainly believe firmly in the benefits of choice and competition, and agree with most
I appreciate what X Windows does for us, I just don't think it's the right solution for a desktop operating environment. Because of all the X apps out there, I think anything that comes out needs X compatibility as a backwards compatible route, but I don't feel that we should look to X Windows for the future. Just my opinion.
Who needs it? Well, businesses, anybody with information they want to keep private, anybody with information they don't want their bosses or employers to know, anybody who keeps secret information or documents that they don't want wife/children/family/parents to pry into, people with mistresses, and yes, perhaps some really bad people like terrorists.
The fact that one already acknowledged to be EXTREMELY incompetent terrorist who failed to successfully ignite his shoe bomb (which was packed with high explosive) ALSO failed to properly obtain a high security add-on for his computer is evidence of exactly one thing: his incompetence. Not of the effectiveness of export restrictions. So while I agree that perhaps investigators obtained useful information because he was using weak encryption, and that is fortunate, export restrictions would not prevent a determined, modestly informed criminal or criminal organization from using real crypto (as opposed to 40 bit crippleware).
You could argue that a really determined criminal could take down a plane too. That's probably true, but we're talking about levels of effort on different orders of magnitude here. One involves 5 minutes and a few clicks on a computer. The other involves serious tactical planning to commit a terrorist act. Conclusion: crypto export restrictions have never protected us from a competent criminal, and they still cause economic harm by restricting free trade of goods that support proper encryption by US companies, giving unfair advantage to foreign companies.
Furthermore, there OUGHT to be substantially more limitations on what rights can be given up by a "click-through" style "license" or an implicit license like the GPL, BSD, or any other usual software license (obviously, enterprise software contracts between companies are different as they usually hold the signatures of representatives/executives from both companies and are substantially more legally binding).
I don't believe a click-through license should be able to give up rights to jury trial (see Borland Kylix license article from yesterday), because right to settlement by jury trial is a fundamental right in our society. Likewise, with the right to privacy and Borland's license term that lets them search your premises for license infringements at their leisure. I believe that a license that gives up the latter right should probably require physical signature by both parties, and I believe the former term (giving up right to jury trial settlement) should be illegal, period. And chances are a lot of courts would agree with me.
If we accept this point of view, then we can probably acknowledge that there are real limitations to the kinds of restrictions that a license such as the GPL can place on its licensees. However, the interesting and VERY important difference here is that in the case of the GPL, you are licensing the Copyrighted work for modification and redistribution. This is a right you don't have at all without the GPL, though it's conceivable that it could be ruled that parts of the GPL are "severable" in the sense that the restrictive clauses don't hold up but the distribution clauses do. This would be a very Bad Thing, of course, were it to happen, since it would violate the intentions of implicit contracts that thousands and thousands of people have entered into by working on GPLed projects. I am not the hugest GPL fan myself, but I don't want the rights of those who have released software under the GPL tromped upon.
A click through license that seeks to limit _external_ rights, rather than grant rights of redistribution or modification of the copyrighted work, is in my opinion, substantially more legally suspect, especially without the legal contract signature. I don't understand how a court could ever rule that such clauses could bind a person and that a person could give up rights _outside_ of the copyright protections already enjoyed by the author of the software they are using. IANAL, but I still hold that this sort of thing will eventually be struck down when a half-way competent lawyer takes it before the courts, UCITA or no UCITA, it's a matter of constitutionality when the license clauses get this outrageous.
[end rant]
If your last point is true, then you have nothing to worry about. I'm just proposing an alternative to X windows. Why is it so damned great that we have Gtk, Xt, and so much toolkit diversity but when I propose an alternative to X Windows everyone shits their pants?
Frankly, the result would be a lot more than nothing. Go use Mac OS X. Tell me that you prefer using X Windows on Linux. If that is the case, then I encourage you to ignore me and my ranting, and I will tell you that you are blind and are not helping bring Linux to the desktop.
Anyway, I do think network transparency, in a secure fashion, should be PART of the windowing system. What I should have said was I don't think network transparency HAS to be done the way X does it, and there is perhaps a different approach to it where more work is done on the client (X server) side.
You may be entirely correct about Mozilla and it sucking at handling certain events. I haven't tried using a preemptible kernel patch, but I imagine that might help alot with responsiveness. And I understand why OS X is good. I am just saying that there's no reason to give up on Free Software producing something equally good. But this isn't just about the implementation, this is about the system design and architecture. XFree86 is an implementation of the X Consortium standard/X11 protocol. OS X is actually designed and architected as a new desktop windowing system and operating environment. I think you are comparing apples and oranges there - that's my entire point. And I was never trying to put down the XFree86 team or a lot of the great work they have done, just saying that I think that something better than XFree86+Gtk/Qt+Gnome/KDE is possible.
Monopoly is not good. I am letting the desktop evolve. In fact I am encouraging it. However, consistency and aesthetics and usability are also good for a desktop environment. If you don't want those features, then continue using X Windows. I am hardly trying to stop you from using the tool you like - but don't insist that I have to use it too.
I have certainly heard of LBX. I think that's a great idea. I don't think it addresses the fact that I think that the approach X Windows takes is fundamentally wrong, though.
I am hardly trying to knock the immense efforts of the XFree86 team, and I am trying to do more than just "bitching". I am hoping to rally people who feel the same way I do and engage in intelligent discourse. Perhaps I'll be convinced otherwise, but it hasn't happened yet. Anybody else's effort at making a working windowing system would invariably involve borrowing a lot of ideas, code, or other stuff from the XFree86 team. I use XFree86, and I don't blame the XFree86 team for the problems endemic to the X11 protocol itself, since they didn't design it. I just think that X11 is long in the tooth. It was great at the time it came about, XFree86 made Linux a usable modern operating system. That doesn't mean we should look no further and deny the problems that have cropped up over the years and the shortcomings of the architecture of an old system.
This basic architecture is not ideal, in my opinion, for a desktop windowing system. I am not saying that there is network overhead when running on the same system. I am saying that X11 sucks because it was architected as a dumb-video-terminal windowing system rather than as a proper desktop windowing system.
I believe that network transparency should be achieved at a higher level, which means assuming more than a dumb video terminal. Larger functional blocks of information, less chattiness, that leaves more of the rendering to the "client" (what is called an X server in the insanity that is the X11 protocol), so that, for example, fonts could be rendered in the more sensible location.
So I don't believe that X11 achieves the _correct_ or _desireable_ form of network transparency for a _desktop windowing system_, though it's a nice backup capability to have, and I don't think X11 will or should go away anytime soon.
Most apps that just involve pixel painting (like an emu type thing) will probably run in comparable speed, since the overhead in blitting pixels to the screen is presumably not in and of itself huge. However, see something like Mozilla, for example. Try moving the window around on and off screen. Watch the redraw of the window when it moves back on screen. Awfully slow, I must say. GUI responsiveness in general is not great in X. I mean, it's not terrible - MUCH better than it used to be on older hardware.
In any case, you missed the entire point of my post, since it wasn't all about the performance of X Windows. Performance wise, X windows is adequate for what it does. Not terrible - but like I said, not great. This is subjective.
Frankly, X windows is on par speed-wise with OS X (subjectively - I'm not comparing them on identical hardware), but what matters is that OS X is aesthetically much more pleasing, renders fonts beautifully, supports transparency and anti-aliasing, and the other nice things that DPS gets you. If you can get all that nicely integrated into your windowing system rather than having them as kludgy strap-ons, and at comparable performance, why not go for it?
I am not forcing the user of the GUI to be anything. I am saying that a desktop windowing system is different from a multipurpose-network thin client windowing system, which is really what X is (err... thin X server... oh well, never mind). X assumes a dumb terminal that renders pixels as its told to. This is fine if that's what you want. What I want is a windowing system designed rationally for the 99% usage case, which is running apps locally on my desktop. Adding an X server to that is not too hard (see OroborOSX and rootless X11 support on OS X for an example).
With regards to "advantage of internal support for vector fonts", the advantage is that all apps would just say "draw these letters to the screen with these fonts" and the anti-aliasing, etc. would happen internally. Now, only apps written to the XRender extension do that. This means some apps support anti-aliasing, some don't. This makes my desktop ugly as sin. Also there are two parallel font management systems. This is a nightmare.
OS X DOES support legacy X11 applications, since you can run XFree86 in rootless mode under Mac OS X. It's just that they are heinous looking compared to Aqua apps.
As for your comments about DPS and the fact that OS X uses DPS as well, I am aware of that. If you are saying we could use X11 with DPS, I suppose that is true, but that seems like yet another awful hack to me. Why not just make something new and better (DPS based or otherwise) and support X11 as an add-on, or for backwards compatibility with legacy X11 apps?
While X windows is mature, and supports a lot of features, and represents (unfortunately) the repository of the vast majority of the current video support for Linux (if all the drivers for video support weren't in X land, perhaps we'd have better X Windows alternatives), that does NOT mean it is the best solution and that people shouldn't be trying to come up with something better.
Just because nobody has done it yet (the only ones you point to who really tried are the Berlin folks, and they've just never had their act together, but have a lot of good concepts).
Just look at OS X for proof that your argument is entirely irrational.
I like the Linux core, I enjoy and am comfortable with Linux as a kernel and the GNU/Linux combo as an OS. I want a better GUI on top of it that pleases my aesthetic sense, makes my life easier when I want it to be easier, doesn't feature at least two separate tracks of font management systems, lots of apps of massively disjoint look-and-feel and more widget toolkits than I care to think about. In other words, Simply GNUStep is a good move, but why don't we consider dropping the X windows? Furthermore, why don't we consider taking this a step further? Hell, OS X took the old NextStep stuff and improved it dramatically. Why don't we do the same, and not be constrained by OS X or attempt to parrot or copy it, and see if we can improve on it?
I agree that source level compatibility with OS X is a nice feature at this point in time since lots of Cocoa apps are being written (primarily because OS X is doing so well), and I like the *Step environments. But I'd like to see some innovation from the Open Source world too.
While it's true that for streaming over the internet directly from a Tivo it wouldn't matter, but it's pretty crazy to go around transferring full bitrate MPEG encoded movies - what most people want to be able to do is download video to their computer and re-encode or shrink it down to a reasonable archiveable size.
This sketches me out - I have a strange feeling that something is going on behind the scenes here - remember the flap over the ReplayTV that could "share movies with your friends". Tivo is a saavy company when it comes to placating the media world. I have a feeling there is a reason they are putting USB on it rather than ethernet directly. But it doesn't quite click to me what it could be - other than that this allows them to assess the industry response to it, and choose to release or not release official ethernet-USB support at a later date without endangering the product itself, and surely some hackers will make ethernet work anyway to appeal to the gear head crowd.
So I think this is a carefully considered business decision. I also know a lot of folks in the Tivo community and have no doubt that within weeks of these things hitting the stores all sorts of cool unintended uses for these USB ports will be thought up. I'll be first in line to buy one, as soon as the DirecTV-integrated version is out.
I have one of these chairs in my offices. Ya know what? I bought it myself, because the chairs our company is willing to fork over for suck. And a lot of people are satisfied with the 100-150 dollar chairs we have in the offices. Those of us with bad backs or who work long hours and aren't satisfied fork out for more ergonomics. What's wrong with that solution? Just insist that you get paid enough that the 800 bucks for an Aeron doesn't break your personal bank.
Though you are right that the "I like you buddy, it's just my boss..." thing is a commonly used bit that is full of crap, that is generally only pulled on somebody at the meeting where they get canned. Assuming there are third parties to corroborate that in fact there is an "upper level" fellow badmouthing you, it certainly can happen.
Whether the Director is justified or correct or not is another question entirely - but it's within believability that such a fellow would try to pressure/build up a case against a lower level (non-direct report) employee who really rubbed them the wrong way. Our 20 year old sysadmin probably means well, but may have shitty social skills and may not have realized that he alienated someone important.
From my personal experience, the support I've gotten from proprietary software vendors who my company has paid 50-75k for software licenses and support to was basically crap (I'm thinking of BEA software here). It took them months to fix compliance issues with Weblogic Server 5.1 - they don't get released until the next patch. My experiences with JBoss Application Server have been far better, with much better support available.
So if what you want is hand-holding or training or full time on site service contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can get that mostly from large services firms no matter what sort of software you are talking about. If what you are talking about is top notch, fast response from the actual developers who are responsible for building the product, then his point is a service contract will help support an Open Source project and get you better support than you would get from an equivalent proprietary software company.
This sort of excess overspending and the lack of emphasis put on _real_ security (i.e. data security rather than physical security) ignores the vastly more likely threat to most company's web servers and database servers (and frankly that's what most of the boxen in these places are - huge rooms full of Yahoo and eBay machines). I'm not saying that a certain degree of security isn't appropriate, but withstanding foreign invasion? Please. The invaders are looking to break in with their armored brigade to the Exodus data center!!! Oh no!! Come on. A modest degree of armed guard presence, a low profile, some generators and massive UPS system - fine, this all makes sense. But you can go overboard.
Anyway, don't take my word for it. Just look at Exodus' stock. Their excesses seemed to ignore the fact that the service they provided just wasn't worth the outrageous amount of money they were charging for it, and these days, the more budget conscious hosting/data center/colo companies are the ones left standing.
Any provider that does this to me will discover they have one less customer very rapidly. Don't advertise 150k/second if what you mean is 150k/second burst rate and an average usage rate of no more than 2k/second.
This gives great credit to anybody - adapting a work of such linguistic depth and complexity, with so many characters and so much plot, even into a 9 hour trilogy of movies is not easy, and though we don't all agree with all the storyline cuts and modifications, these people deserve the money they are making from the film for such a good job done.
However, while you are reading, let me give my two cents of things I didn't like, cinematically and directorially about this movie: the atrocious use of music in gaudy fashion, trying to push audience emotions around to make up for mediocre acting in some scenes. It was just overdone - music is fine and necessary, but in a good movie you should barely notice it, unless it's really appropriate in a scene. In LoTR:FoTR I noticed it on several occasions, and in a bad way and it made my cheese-factor detector kick into high gear. The other thing that greatly diminished the experience for me was the overly sappy filming of the scenes at the end of the movie. Elijah Wood is not a great, emotive actor. Long face shots of him with tears flowing trying to look like he is distraught are just not engaging in cinematic form. I saw the audience squirming in their seats in the last 3-4 minutes of the movie last night (the second time I was seeing the movie by the way). While you can't change the division of the movie into three parts and keep to the book, you have to do the best you can to at least make the ending _feel_ more engaging.