I had a thing like this on linux. A gkrellm plugin was crashing randomly, it got me angry enough to spend half a day and fix the threads stepping on each other's toes and a few memory problems. It runs fine since then. Not a crash in 4 months.
I encourage you to try and fix with your favourite crashy windows app.
I don't think the 'running Linux requires tinkering with it every day' is a valid assertion any more. I've been using GNU/Linux at work for the past 6 months and ironically today is the first time I had to recompile my kernel or otherwise dabble into internals. Otherwise it is just emerge -up world every once in a while before going home.
About being late for an important meeting: I cannot edit Office docs within my linux (screws up the formatting) - so what - we have a dedicated Win. server for that. Rdeskop into it - problem solved.
Dude, you earned youself some foe-points. I hate nothing more than a superficial, "conciliatory" post backed by nothing. If you actually used one of the *NIX systems, you would KNOW the difference. I guess your " Both systems blow, and just as equally" post is for the rest of the Windows crowd. Something like 'Nothing to see here, move along'.
Or maybe your post is skewed from a windows developer's point of view. Let's take the "disadvantages" one by one:
no standard exists
There are clean standards of configuration files in linux: DSV Style RFC 822 Format RFC 822 metaformat for records Cookie-Jar Format
better security (advanced ACL support, not every app has it own parser)
Theoretically. But in practice, who needs advanced ACL support when your users login as root? About parsers, see above, all of the standard formats are trivial.
weaker security (it is either put in user or etc, you do not have an option of put in etc but allow just this setting for users)
I really do not follow this. How is this weaker security? But after all it can be done. Default settings in/etc, modified setting for property foo in ~/. User settings override default settings.
With ATI's binary drivers I am having a constant memory leak that I cannot trace to any app (I tried Xrestop too), which goes away as soon as I kill and restart X. Leaving the laptop running more than a day gobbles up all RAM. I have a strong suspicion it is the ATI driver.
Well guess what. I edited about 20 config files when I installed linux. 5 months into it, I never touched ONE. And my system is as snappy as it was when I installed it and everything keeps working just fine.
I had to rewrite the threading code in gkrellm-newsticker so it would stop segfaulting gkrellm though...
The problem with your idea is that we would need to implement a whole security API into X so that some schmuck does not garbage X configuration over the net or logged in locally as an unprivileged user, or from a rogue application (virus anyone?). The solution in itself will possibly contain bugs and such.
From a security perspective, it makes much more sense to rely on the file permissions to handle the issue.
Moreover, the 'everything is a file' philosophy in Linux is pretty strong and text files are the way to configure things in Linux. Even Microsoft has admitted that linux is easier to administer than windows. So considering the API you speak of was created, then X would need to update the config file after a config via API. It will need root privileges, and that is another security issue.
Well I am not a X developer and perhaps I am spouting nonsense. But the X configuration file suit me just fine.
OK, analogy flawed. But your choice of terms is more so.
They can easily create all the culture they want without having to steal ours.
It is not stealing. It is using a copy without permission. Since you agreed that they would not pay for it anyway, then the issue is not about lost profit, is it? It is about control. You want to dictate others how to use copies of your creation.
Well you have the notion that it is your right to control what other people do with your creation. Other cultures might have a different view on that, especially since the idea of Intellectual Property is not yet 20 years old. So to them it is not "theft". It may be even morally just. They certainly did not do anything damaging to you.
Now, you propose that a nation-power spend taxpayer money on imposing foreign policies, alien to its constituents. To incarcerate people for years, for doing something they find morally ok, just to satisfy your need of control. If I were the Chinese govt, I'd send you packing.
They legitimately created it and legitimately own it. If you want a copy, then you pay. If you don't want a copy, then don't pay. It is that frickin easy.
Ok let's turn the tables.
You get out of a pub and want to pee. Very badly. There are plenty of toilets in the street but every one asks for $5,000 for you to take a pee. Now, that is half your month's salary. You revolt, because it is hard earned money. You pee onto a bush nearby, to be seen by noone. You go home.
That is quite similar to the situation with the price of prepackaged culture in China. And I would say the need to pee is as important as the need to produce and consume cultural works. It is basic to human nature.
What you are asking that on every street there be police men to support the profits of the toliet lords of your city. That is not right, you know, from where I stand.
Even if only 1% of the population bought a CD every month, that would mean 10,000,000+ copies sold a month
That is denying the other 99% of your work. If everybody insisted on the same $10 price, it would lock out 99% of the population out of cultural works. Guess what those people would do next. Pirate!
They legitimately created it and legitimately own it. If you want a copy, then you pay. If you don't want a copy, then don't pay. It is that frickin easy.
Man, you live in a fantasy world. Let me put it this way: If you are not willing to sell 0s and 1s for a fair price, people will copy it for free. And if you try to criminalize it, you will have to put half the people in jail.
I think the price you ask is just too high on the balance of things. To be willing to ruin the lives of so many people, just to be able to dictate your price.
Frankly, it is not unreasonable to assume that someone out of the billion+ people living in China would buy a $10 CD if piracy was stamped out. Further, it is not unreasonable to assume that even a low percentage of those billion+ people living in China would buy a $10 CD if piracy was stamped out.
That is the problem. You want the world to suit your will. It just won't work. Even if you think what you want is 'moral'. It is not. It is greedy and control-freak-like.
It is people like you who want to control people and the world around them, for whatever reason, that disgust me most. No wonder you worked for Microsoft.
If this guy wants good AI's with a selection of weapons, he should fire up some bots in Quake or UT and get his fill of immaculately aimed rail guns up his ass every 5 seconds. Wheee!!!
Well we seem to have the problem of defining good AI. To me, good AI is NOT:
all-knowing and predicting where exactly you will be in.3 seconds to shoot you in the eye (for shooters)
expanding like crazy and building up an army before you can say "Hello, Betty!" (RTS)
using dirty tricks like knowing the map, your location, the size of your forces etc. GRATUITOUSLY (for RTS)
A good AI would:
Try various tactics to choose the best
Model human behaviour to the max (make mistakes, get blinded by harsh light, get nervous and drop weapon, panic and freeze, panic & run away, have problems seeing in the dark, get confused in unfamiliar settings, etc.)
Send out recon parties to scout the area
Use terrain/environment for tactical advantage
I remember some of these features in UFO I made me very happy and immersed. It felt BOTH real and fun. UFO Aftermath disappointed me,however, due to extremely long-range deadly weapons that negated the effect of (little) terrain diversity during missions. (rant) They could have spent a few more weeks tweaking the range/damage, to make it really nice (/end rant)
Starcraft would be another example of bad AI that lead to stupid and repetitive games against the computer, but it was not designed to be an RTS AI anyway...
Face it, most paid-for programming work is just qualified plumbing. It IS boring. The fun in writing an optimized routine that implements some business logic has subsided over the years. I will not even go into web programming (shudders). It seems like programming has been industrialized, where you write some piece of a whole assembly, not seeing the results of your work anymore. It can be frustrating.
Some people write OSS because they are bored as hell out of their job. Writing a boring driver would just make it worse.
Sound far-fetched? Try buying an HDTV tuner card to build a Myth-TV box after the middle of next year that will ignore the broadcast flag.
This would drive me nuts.
It is in the major companies' interests to keep us as specialized as possible as to be "consumers" in a mass-manufactured world, not actors in a society of creation, self-improvement, and mutual exchange. Freedom to tinker with stuff is perhaps the last chance people have of maintaining some sort of independence, a way to get out of the specialized "class" each of us is forced into. What better way to turn us into robots than denying us any chance to create things ourselves and share them with others? Perhaps rebellion to this is one reason of why OSS exists in the first place.
The next logical step over a decade is to impose a ridiculous amount of regulation on order to forbid the creation and distribution of stuff by the robo^H^H^H^H"consumers".
According to John Taylor Gatto's book, both Rockefeller and Carnegie were the initiators of dumbing out of the American schools at the beginning of the 20th century:
By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."
If a company wishes to sell a product but does not want others to use their source code, they should write it all themselves and keep it secret. It is hypocritical to push people into giving away their code when you are not ready to do the same.
Now, that may offer an unfair advantage to OSS projects but that was the whole point of GPL, wasn't it? And most developers seem to like it just fine. So,
You cannot use GPL because you will be sued in court like SCO. Use our OS, we would never sue you! As compliment we will offer you a free browser, media player and firewall! Yay!
Obviously, since this technology hadn't existed before, Microsoft hadn't anticipated that some folks would hijack the API and use it to get people to install software that will spy on them.
I do hope this was a joke.
Compare ActiveX with Java which was designed by intelligent people and had a sandbox feature which would not allow untrusted code to wreak havoc within the system.
I do not remember where I heard this but presumably ActiveX was Microsoft's response to Java. If that's true, the useful and innovative ActiveX technology is just an inferior copycat of Java.
Of course BGates did not think it would enable malicious programs to screw people up. How would they, coming from MS-DOS (a single-process, single-user system with a FS with no san permission built-in)?
but I thought people used windows so they would not have to THINK about stuff. The theory was that windows liberates you from all the technical weird geeky things you don't need to know about. You know, just plug it in and WORK.
We are not talking about experienced users here, but of the "normal" people who got the impression of easier use, more powerful etc. computer (remember Win95 installation slides?)
I guess the first step is to admit that Microsoft has failed to provide an easy, fun, simple, safe and maintenance-free environment for their customers.
God I hate seeing ignorant fucks blaming the software vendor for their own ignorance, then getting modded up for it. It's not Microsoft's fault that you don't RTFM or open your eyes to see that there's other configuration options when you use a feature.
For some reason Slashdot hosts a few RTFM guys that must have been linux zealots in a previous life... Come on, this is Windows, it IS supposed to be usable by an idiot.
Funny how the tables have turned... now we have WINDOWS apologists!
The article in english says that Winny was used to spread secret information belonging the japan police. So the tool has BEEN used for a just cause, imo.
Sun promised to deliver an applet platform, but then changed directions to server-side programming and a half-hearted effort at a cross-platform toolkit.
200% right!!
I'd still like to see something better than JavaScript and Flash for applet-like functionality, but it's clear Sun isn't going to deliver anymore.
Maybe applets were a crappy thing in 1993-96 because of long downloads but it was a very well conceived network technology: sandbox+virtual machine+browser integration. Just about perfect to use now. If java dies, I would love to see an open-source version, if just for the applets.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a thing like this on linux. A gkrellm plugin was crashing randomly, it got me angry enough to spend half a day and fix the threads stepping on each other's toes and a few memory problems. It runs fine since then. Not a crash in 4 months.
I encourage you to try and fix with your favourite crashy windows app.
Will then everything will be measured in mMSFTs, except for the RIAA/MPAA who would be in units?
I don't think the 'running Linux requires tinkering with it every day' is a valid assertion any more. I've been using GNU/Linux at work for the past 6 months and ironically today is the first time I had to recompile my kernel or otherwise dabble into internals. Otherwise it is just emerge -up world every once in a while before going home.
About being late for an important meeting:
I cannot edit Office docs within my linux (screws up the formatting) - so what - we have a dedicated Win. server for that. Rdeskop into it - problem solved.
Dude, you earned youself some foe-points. I hate nothing more than a superficial, "conciliatory" post backed by nothing. If you actually used one of the *NIX systems, you would KNOW the difference. I guess your " Both systems blow, and just as equally" post is for the rest of the Windows crowd. Something like 'Nothing to see here, move along'.
/etc, modified setting for property foo in ~/. User settings override default settings.
Or maybe your post is skewed from a windows developer's point of view. Let's take the "disadvantages" one by one:
no standard exists
There are clean standards of configuration files in linux:
DSV Style
RFC 822 Format
RFC 822 metaformat for records
Cookie-Jar Format
More information can be found here: http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch05s02.html
better security (advanced ACL support, not every app has it own parser)
Theoretically. But in practice, who needs advanced ACL support when your users login as root? About parsers, see above, all of the standard formats are trivial.
weaker security (it is either put in user or etc, you do not have an option of put in etc but allow just this setting for users)
I really do not follow this. How is this weaker security? But after all it can be done. Default settings in
Please mod parent down (-1,misinformed,troll)
I would mod you up to +5 if I had the mod points.. very well written. Thanks.
With ATI's binary drivers I am having a constant memory leak that I cannot trace to any app (I tried Xrestop too), which goes away as soon as I kill and restart X. Leaving the laptop running more than a day gobbles up all RAM. I have a strong suspicion it is the ATI driver.
Just my 2 cents.
Well guess what. I edited about 20 config files when I installed linux. 5 months into it, I never touched ONE. And my system is as snappy as it was when I installed it and everything keeps working just fine.
I had to rewrite the threading code in gkrellm-newsticker so it would stop segfaulting gkrellm though...
The problem with your idea is that we would need to implement a whole security API into X so that some schmuck does not garbage X configuration over the net or logged in locally as an unprivileged user, or from a rogue application (virus anyone?). The solution in itself will possibly contain bugs and such.
From a security perspective, it makes much more sense to rely on the file permissions to handle the issue.
Moreover, the 'everything is a file' philosophy in Linux is pretty strong and text files are the way to configure things in Linux. Even Microsoft has admitted that linux is easier to administer than windows. So considering the API you speak of was created, then X would need to update the config file after a config via API. It will need root privileges, and that is another security issue.
Well I am not a X developer and perhaps I am spouting nonsense. But the X configuration file suit me just fine.
OK, analogy flawed. But your choice of terms is more so.
They can easily create all the culture they want without having to steal ours.
It is not stealing. It is using a copy without permission. Since you agreed that they would not pay for it anyway, then the issue is not about lost profit, is it? It is about control. You want to dictate others how to use copies of your creation.
Well you have the notion that it is your right to control what other people do with your creation. Other cultures might have a different view on that, especially since the idea of Intellectual Property is not yet 20 years old. So to them it is not "theft". It may be even morally just. They certainly did not do anything damaging to you.
Now, you propose that a nation-power spend taxpayer money on imposing foreign policies, alien to its constituents. To incarcerate people for years, for doing something they find morally ok, just to satisfy your need of control. If I were the Chinese govt, I'd send you packing.
They legitimately created it and legitimately own it. If you want a copy, then you pay. If you don't want a copy, then don't pay. It is that frickin easy.
Ok let's turn the tables.
You get out of a pub and want to pee. Very badly. There are plenty of toilets in the street but every one asks for $5,000 for you to take a pee. Now, that is half your month's salary. You revolt, because it is hard earned money. You pee onto a bush nearby, to be seen by noone. You go home.
That is quite similar to the situation with the price of prepackaged culture in China. And I would say the need to pee is as important as the need to produce and consume cultural works. It is basic to human nature.
What you are asking that on every street there be police men to support the profits of the toliet lords of your city. That is not right, you know, from where I stand.
Even if only 1% of the population bought a CD every month, that would mean 10,000,000+ copies sold a month
That is denying the other 99% of your work. If everybody insisted on the same $10 price, it would lock out 99% of the population out of cultural works. Guess what those people would do next. Pirate!
They legitimately created it and legitimately own it. If you want a copy, then you pay. If you don't want a copy, then don't pay. It is that frickin easy.
Man, you live in a fantasy world. Let me put it this way: If you are not willing to sell 0s and 1s for a fair price, people will copy it for free. And if you try to criminalize it, you will have to put half the people in jail.
I think the price you ask is just too high on the balance of things. To be willing to ruin the lives of so many people, just to be able to dictate your price.
Frankly, it is not unreasonable to assume that someone out of the billion+ people living in China would buy a $10 CD if piracy was stamped out. Further, it is not unreasonable to assume that even a low percentage of those billion+ people living in China would buy a $10 CD if piracy was stamped out.
That is the problem. You want the world to suit your will. It just won't work. Even if you think what you want is 'moral'. It is not. It is greedy and control-freak-like.
It is people like you who want to control people and the world around them, for whatever reason, that disgust me most. No wonder you worked for Microsoft.
Well we seem to have the problem of defining good AI. To me, good AI is NOT:
- all-knowing and predicting where exactly you will be in
.3 seconds to shoot you in the eye (for shooters)
- expanding like crazy and building up an army before you can say "Hello, Betty!" (RTS)
- using dirty tricks like knowing the map, your location, the size of your forces etc. GRATUITOUSLY (for RTS)
A good AI would:- Try various tactics to choose the best
- Model human behaviour to the max (make mistakes, get blinded by harsh light, get nervous and drop weapon, panic and freeze, panic & run away, have problems seeing in the dark, get confused in unfamiliar settings, etc.)
- Send out recon parties to scout the area
- Use terrain/environment for tactical advantage
I remember some of these features in UFO I made me very happy and immersed. It felt BOTH real and fun. UFO Aftermath disappointed me,however, due to extremely long-range deadly weapons that negated the effect of (little) terrain diversity during missions. (rant) They could have spent a few more weeks tweaking the range/damage, to make it really nice (/end rant)Starcraft would be another example of bad AI that lead to stupid and repetitive games against the computer, but it was not designed to be an RTS AI anyway...
Face it, most paid-for programming work is just qualified plumbing. It IS boring. The fun in writing an optimized routine that implements some business logic has subsided over the years. I will not even go into web programming (shudders). It seems like programming has been industrialized, where you write some piece of a whole assembly, not seeing the results of your work anymore. It can be frustrating.
Some people write OSS because they are bored as hell out of their job. Writing a boring driver would just make it worse.
ldd /usr/sbin/sshd | awk {'print $3'} | xargs -ikkk cp kkk /home/chroot/sshd
This would drive me nuts.
It is in the major companies' interests to keep us as specialized as possible as to be "consumers" in a mass-manufactured world, not actors in a society of creation, self-improvement, and mutual exchange. Freedom to tinker with stuff is perhaps the last chance people have of maintaining some sort of independence, a way to get out of the specialized "class" each of us is forced into. What better way to turn us into robots than denying us any chance to create things ourselves and share them with others? Perhaps rebellion to this is one reason of why OSS exists in the first place.
The next logical step over a decade is to impose a ridiculous amount of regulation on order to forbid the creation and distribution of stuff by the robo^H^H^H^H"consumers".
By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."
You may read the whole book at: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
I agree.
If a company wishes to sell a product but does not want others to use their source code, they should write it all themselves and keep it secret. It is hypocritical to push people into giving away their code when you are not ready to do the same.
Now, that may offer an unfair advantage to OSS projects but that was the whole point of GPL, wasn't it? And most developers seem to like it just fine. So,
Get your dirty hands off GPL!
As usual, M$ will spin it to something like:
You cannot use GPL because you will be sued in court like SCO. Use our OS, we would never sue you! As compliment we will offer you a free browser, media player and firewall! Yay!
Perhaps you should get together with other small companies and protest and demonstrate in front of the Deutscher Bundestag?
People's demonstrations are not new... perhaps a company demonstration of a few thousand would make a difference!
I do hope this was a joke.
Compare ActiveX with Java which was designed by intelligent people and had a sandbox feature which would not allow untrusted code to wreak havoc within the system.
I do not remember where I heard this but presumably ActiveX was Microsoft's response to Java. If that's true, the useful and innovative ActiveX technology is just an inferior copycat of Java.
Of course BGates did not think it would enable malicious programs to screw people up. How would they, coming from MS-DOS (a single-process, single-user system with a FS with no san permission built-in)?
but I thought people used windows so they would not have to THINK about stuff. The theory was that windows liberates you from all the technical weird geeky things you don't need to know about. You know, just plug it in and WORK.
We are not talking about experienced users here, but of the "normal" people who got the impression of easier use, more powerful etc. computer (remember Win95 installation slides?)
I guess the first step is to admit that Microsoft has failed to provide an easy, fun, simple, safe and maintenance-free environment for their customers.
For some reason Slashdot hosts a few RTFM guys that must have been linux zealots in a previous life ... Come on, this is Windows, it IS supposed to be usable by an idiot.
Funny how the tables have turned... now we have WINDOWS apologists!
The article in english says that Winny was used to spread secret information belonging the japan police. So the tool has BEEN used for a just cause, imo.
The penguins on the T-shirt in the last photo look especially neat... kudos to the designer!
Sun promised to deliver an applet platform, but then changed directions to server-side programming and a half-hearted effort at a cross-platform toolkit.
200% right!!
I'd still like to see something better than JavaScript and Flash for applet-like functionality, but it's clear Sun isn't going to deliver anymore.
Maybe applets were a crappy thing in 1993-96 because of long downloads but it was a very well conceived network technology: sandbox+virtual machine+browser integration. Just about perfect to use now. If java dies, I would love to see an open-source version, if just for the applets.