Youtube's blocking of that video was an effort to save lives. I'm not convinced that the production of the "Innocence of Muslims" wasn't intended to have the effect it had. Perhaps as a people those who are murderously offended by such things need to grow up and get a thicker skin. I'll grant that. But any words, religiously themed or not, which are intended to offend are reprehensible. And I applaud Youtube for taking steps to mitigate the disaster that video initiated.
Beyond this, so many people (Americans especially) have this "I may not like what you say, but I'll die to defend your right to say it" attitude that sounds good on the surface, but which denies a basic fact, which is that words which are intended to be hateful do hurt. There is no place for any action which is intended to harm, whether that action is picking up a stick or a pen. There is a difference between an unpopular idea expressed in good faith, and one intended to offend. And while differentiating may be difficult, in an age of instant global communications, at least Youtube stood up and tried. They made a call with what they will allow on a network they own. No one should have gotten murderously angry over this video, but the fact is some people did. And you may not like suppressing ideas, but there may be some people alive today who wouldn't be if that video wasn't turned off for a time. Which of those people is the EFF going to tell shouldn't be alive today?
How is a company defending a legitimate copyright imply anything about the quality of their machines.
First of all, there is a difference between "defending" a copyright and using a copyright underhandedly. I could use copyright law to promote racism by including a license that forbids the reading of a book by a particular race or creed. The law would allow this, but I doubt many would argue that it is ethical. Toshiba has a copyright on the material and the law allows them do act as they did. Those are facts. But just because the law allows Toshiba to use a copyright in this way does not make it any more or less right. In fact, it is the use of copyright law for unethical purposes that prompted the FSF to use copyright law as a weapon to further a better purpose.
I see no obvious money-making possibility for Tim's laptop service manual site. I have advertisement blocked, so I don't know if the site has any, but even if it does, I highly doubt the revenue from that even remotely covers the site costs. So implying that the site stole Toshiba's manuals to make money from is disingenuous.
How does Toshiba's actions say anything about the quality of their products? Using copyright to suppress the distribution of technical material that most companies try to distribute as widely as possible... this can be taken to mean there is something in those technical materials that Toshiba does not want people knowing. Which can imply a poor product.
It doesn't matter if it shows incredibly low understanding of what a QR code is. Slashdot doesn't care about accuracy as much as it cares about what will stir up comments. Put in a story that has, like this one does, an error in understanding of the technology or risk of a virus, is poking a stick into a nerd's nest. They'll all come out buzzing angrily posting about it, and Slashdot is all happy because they get comments and clicks and interest.
There are a lot of this type of story with the kind of tauntingly inaccuracies that this one has posted to Slashdot recently. So many, I suspect their editors are making a conscious effort to do so.
For $150,000, I would take the time to make a "prototype" cartridge. Built with 80s technology, this would not be hard to make at home. The kind of price tag that is being asked for it is something that is reserved for items with verified provenance. And when I said verified, I mean something more than the seller saying "go google 'NES ZELDA PROTO'". Which, interestingly enough turns up a couple of forum threads debating whether or not it's genuine.
Seriously, making this thing would be an afternoon project. I hope someone insists on some serious background checks.
The company is presumably going to use the software in-house. Which means, until and unless they do at some point decide to release the software, there are no constraints. They can do whatever they want with it, including modify it without "releasing" the source.
I'm not sure what GPL-ing what will be in-house software gets you, the author.
Hello. My name is Kurt. What kinda name is that. German. Cool! Me too! You're German? Czech. So you're not German? I am not. Then why did you say "me too"? I didn't. Did the lobotomy hurt? Where did th ebarn come from?
Well, I'll jump in and say with several polls showing that >80% of users who know about the way to disable tabs on top doing just that, my question is why make the majority of your users jump through the hoop?
If version numbers were just numbers it wouldn't matter. But version number inflating breaks plugins, and Mozilla is going "end-of-life" on previous versions much more quickly now. So instead of getting security patches for a year, you get them for a month. Now imagine you have a hundred, or a thousand PCs to support.
The whole problem is that it's not a just a number. And that's what makes us upset.
Normalizing against dates would work if they kept updating old versions with security patches for a year or so like they used to. But they're not doing this any more. They are going "end of life" on each "major" release as soon as the next one is out, which means you fall behind by a version and it doesn't matter that it's only a month old, you don't get security patches any more.
So sure, normalize against dates to see how "outdated" you are, but if your version is six months old, that's five months of security patches you're not getting.
Intelligent garbage collection is great. In fact, I disagree with what many of the "compiler" fanatics go on about when they say garbage collection is for programmers who don't know how to clean up after themselves. I also agree with much of the rest of your post. However, you don't need a VM for any of it. A VM implemented to accomplish tasks that you need to use a VM for because the OS lacks the support mechanisms is destined to end up along the wayside. And a VM implemented by a company who's bread and butter is operating systems that then uses a VM to accomplish tasks because their OS lacks the support is just sad.
None of what you promote (except for the garbage collection) are advantages of.NET, per se. They are advantages of the MS C# implementation. Rather than saddling people with yet another VM, MS could have added garbage collection into the native API and implemented C# purely native. What a fantastic benefit that would have been.
*sigh* I hate having to explain this every time. Makes me feel old.
What is interpreted? It's a native runtime reading a non-native set of instructions, deciding what to do with it in real-time, and then running native code to execute those instructions.
What is JIT compiling? Well, "Just-In-Time" compiling is compiling just-in-time to run. So it's a native runtime reading a non-native set of instructions, deciding what to do with it in real-time, and then running native code to execute those instructions.
JIT is a catchword euphamism. It came into being because "interpreted" became a dirty word when compilers became available to the masses. It does tend to infer a level of native code caching that straight "interpreters" didn't used to have. The reality is, though, that any good interpreted language has some amount of caching. In fact modern versions of some historically "interpreted" languages that now cache are in many cases labelled JIT compilers vice interpreters.
Keep in mind too that JIT compiler caching, even for the most state-of-the-art bytecode languages, isn't as efficient as many people like to think. Many language structures and primitives require re-"compiling" each time they are encountered.
The reality is, JIT "compiling" is simply a somewhat more efficient interpreter.
Delphi, C++ Builder, and the free cousin Lazarus are great tools for this. Lazarus is making some great cross-platform strides too. As a bonus, when you're done, you have real code.:)
.net co-exist with Javascript and HTML5? I think the whippersnappers are indeed lacking your experience. They haven't yet found anything to smoke that even comes close to your stash.
Unfair = "not conforming to approved standards, as of justice, honesty, or ethics" - the statement was not unjust, certainly not dishonest, and unless you make money writing C++ compilers, it wasn't unethical. Please, by all means, tell all the.net programmers out there to get real jobs.
Of course.NET was a mistake. It had all the drawbacks of an interpreted system with none of the benefits. Inherent cross-platform run-anywhere ability which was Java's purpose from the beginning was never intended for.net. Cross-platform is the only consideration that makes interpreted code worth the cost in resources..NET was a needless (read useless) distraction, and the only "benefit" I can perceive is an across-the-board requirement for people to purchase more powerful hardware to accomplish the same goals.
There's never been any question I've had about Ubuntu that couldn't be answered with about thirty seconds worth of grepping around the internet. That is, unless it was so esoteric that no pocket guide would have the answer anyway. The reality is, pocket guides like this just aren't relevant in today's environment. Certainly not in a paper-print format. Searchable PDF is far more useful to begin with. I would definitely question the assertion he would have made more money with a traditional publisher. More likely you'd have seen the books lining the ninety-nine cent bargain bins in liquidation marts - that is if they weren't being trucked to recyclers sans covers.
There are more forums, wikis, blogs, and articles on Ubuntu than I could possibly read in a century. A pocket book on Ubuntu failing to make the author rich is newsworthy like a chocolate factory startup failing in Hershey Pennsylvania. My advice to the author is take the nine grand and run. I think he made out like a bandit on this.
You seem to think that corporations have a duty to provide you with everything you want. A person or group of people exercising their right not to so something is not censorship. The whole idea that Amazon, or anyone for that matter, who chooses not to sell something is breaking some sort of trust is ridiculous. It is up to Amazon's shareholders and board of directors to determine the policies on what they will or won't sell.
Feel free to complain to them if they don't sell what you want, that's part of business. But labelling it censorship and getting hot and bothered about them becoming totalitarian is ludicrous on its face. Hell, if a huge retailer is purposefully abandoning a market segment, this should be news for celebration. Wow, a huge company is ignoring market! Let's get some investors together and fill the market share and make scads of money doing it.
So, either complain to Amazon, or start your own business. It's not censorship when someone else decides not to sell something you want. It's censorship when someone comes into your house with a gun and says gimme your porn.
Unfortunately, Slackware hasn't carried GNOME since 2005. Mr. Volkerding dropped it because it was "too much work". There are other third party GNOME packagers for Slackware. However, GNOME isn't just a desktop - it needs support from underneath X for some things, so any set of GNOME packages makes changes to Slackware that are more or less compatible with a basic Slackware install. I used Dropline for a while, but came to the decision that I wanted my desktop to be officially supported on my distro, not an afterthought. And, in the end, the "one-man-distro" concept that Slackware is just wasn't enough any more.
This really made me sad. Slackware is the garage-built Apple II of the Linux world (I figure SLS was the Apple I). Unfortunately, Linux has moved on from what one person can really package together. Slackware losing GNOME was just a symptom of this larger issue. I know for a fact that many people have offered to help Mr. Volkerding with various aspects of Slackware. I know at least one of the major GNOME packagers for Slackware has offered to do all the GNOME work for Slackware. I myself have made the offer too. Mr. Volkerding just doesn't seem interested in a community for Slackware. As I said, a one-man garage OS just isn't enough, unfortunately.
I ended up standardizing on Debian for all my machines. I've ugraded two production machines across three versions of Debian now - it just works, always. Debian is conservative, which is perfect for production machines. And it has real package management.
Every time I see a new Slackware version it makes me sad. Like seeing an old man wheezing on for another birthday. I'd rather see it go now, than continue to bleed marketshare into complete irrelevancy.
Mixing high tech electronics with automotives has always struck me as the worst fusion of the old joke: "the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman is the used car salesman knows when he's lying". As an engineer it may seem like a good idea to you that the equipment is expensive, but how many mechanics are also engineers? Mechanics are often not even mechanics any more. They plug in the diagnostic and whatever it says is wrong, is what is wrong. Don't try and tell them that it doesn't make sense that a stretched timing belt is causing the shimmy coming from the front passenger wheel, darn it, that's what the computer says.
No, the reality is that the reason the equipment is expensive is so that dealerships have a corner on the market. Post-sales service is one of the largest sources of dealership income. Which, if you think about it, is a truly sad state of affairs. Besides politicians, what is the one thing people are often most cynical about? It's auto dealerships. Because no matter how educated the average person gets about the way a vehicle works, a clever desk manager can always tell you the mechanic in the back plugged in a diagnostic and it said the "[techspeak] board indicated the [techspeak] [techspeak] has failed which [techspeaks] your ignition, and this is caused by road salt erosion of your [techspeak] which is obviously not covered under the warranty".
No, making the test equipment expensive, or otherwise keeping it out of reach of the public is not the answer to either the technical issue of vehicle "safety" or the PR issue of cynical consumers. The answer is open standards, common test equipment, and education. This just doesn't do anything for dealership income, that's all.
Slashdot Mirror
Youtube's blocking of that video was an effort to save lives. I'm not convinced that the production of the "Innocence of Muslims" wasn't intended to have the effect it had. Perhaps as a people those who are murderously offended by such things need to grow up and get a thicker skin. I'll grant that. But any words, religiously themed or not, which are intended to offend are reprehensible. And I applaud Youtube for taking steps to mitigate the disaster that video initiated.
Beyond this, so many people (Americans especially) have this "I may not like what you say, but I'll die to defend your right to say it" attitude that sounds good on the surface, but which denies a basic fact, which is that words which are intended to be hateful do hurt. There is no place for any action which is intended to harm, whether that action is picking up a stick or a pen. There is a difference between an unpopular idea expressed in good faith, and one intended to offend. And while differentiating may be difficult, in an age of instant global communications, at least Youtube stood up and tried. They made a call with what they will allow on a network they own. No one should have gotten murderously angry over this video, but the fact is some people did. And you may not like suppressing ideas, but there may be some people alive today who wouldn't be if that video wasn't turned off for a time. Which of those people is the EFF going to tell shouldn't be alive today?
First of all, there is a difference between "defending" a copyright and using a copyright underhandedly. I could use copyright law to promote racism by including a license that forbids the reading of a book by a particular race or creed. The law would allow this, but I doubt many would argue that it is ethical. Toshiba has a copyright on the material and the law allows them do act as they did. Those are facts. But just because the law allows Toshiba to use a copyright in this way does not make it any more or less right. In fact, it is the use of copyright law for unethical purposes that prompted the FSF to use copyright law as a weapon to further a better purpose.
I see no obvious money-making possibility for Tim's laptop service manual site. I have advertisement blocked, so I don't know if the site has any, but even if it does, I highly doubt the revenue from that even remotely covers the site costs. So implying that the site stole Toshiba's manuals to make money from is disingenuous.
How does Toshiba's actions say anything about the quality of their products? Using copyright to suppress the distribution of technical material that most companies try to distribute as widely as possible... this can be taken to mean there is something in those technical materials that Toshiba does not want people knowing. Which can imply a poor product.
It doesn't matter if it shows incredibly low understanding of what a QR code is. Slashdot doesn't care about accuracy as much as it cares about what will stir up comments. Put in a story that has, like this one does, an error in understanding of the technology or risk of a virus, is poking a stick into a nerd's nest. They'll all come out buzzing angrily posting about it, and Slashdot is all happy because they get comments and clicks and interest.
There are a lot of this type of story with the kind of tauntingly inaccuracies that this one has posted to Slashdot recently. So many, I suspect their editors are making a conscious effort to do so.
For $150,000, I would take the time to make a "prototype" cartridge. Built with 80s technology, this would not be hard to make at home. The kind of price tag that is being asked for it is something that is reserved for items with verified provenance. And when I said verified, I mean something more than the seller saying "go google 'NES ZELDA PROTO'". Which, interestingly enough turns up a couple of forum threads debating whether or not it's genuine.
Seriously, making this thing would be an afternoon project. I hope someone insists on some serious background checks.
The company is presumably going to use the software in-house. Which means, until and unless they do at some point decide to release the software, there are no constraints. They can do whatever they want with it, including modify it without "releasing" the source.
I'm not sure what GPL-ing what will be in-house software gets you, the author.
qBitTorrent is a fantastic open source alternative to uTorrent.
I wholeheartedly agree. The whole point of Gigabit is that one computer can't saturate it. You don't want any one transfer saturating a network.
Conversation I just had...
Hello. My name is Kurt.
What kinda name is that.
German.
Cool! Me too!
You're German?
Czech.
So you're not German?
I am not.
Then why did you say "me too"?
I didn't.
Did the lobotomy hurt?
Where did th ebarn come from?
Well, I'll jump in and say with several polls showing that >80% of users who know about the way to disable tabs on top doing just that, my question is why make the majority of your users jump through the hoop?
If version numbers were just numbers it wouldn't matter. But version number inflating breaks plugins, and Mozilla is going "end-of-life" on previous versions much more quickly now. So instead of getting security patches for a year, you get them for a month. Now imagine you have a hundred, or a thousand PCs to support.
The whole problem is that it's not a just a number. And that's what makes us upset.
Normalizing against dates would work if they kept updating old versions with security patches for a year or so like they used to. But they're not doing this any more. They are going "end of life" on each "major" release as soon as the next one is out, which means you fall behind by a version and it doesn't matter that it's only a month old, you don't get security patches any more.
So sure, normalize against dates to see how "outdated" you are, but if your version is six months old, that's five months of security patches you're not getting.
Mozilla's new system is just simply untenable.
This is still too slow. They need 110816.0830(z)
Intelligent garbage collection is great. In fact, I disagree with what many of the "compiler" fanatics go on about when they say garbage collection is for programmers who don't know how to clean up after themselves. I also agree with much of the rest of your post. However, you don't need a VM for any of it. A VM implemented to accomplish tasks that you need to use a VM for because the OS lacks the support mechanisms is destined to end up along the wayside. And a VM implemented by a company who's bread and butter is operating systems that then uses a VM to accomplish tasks because their OS lacks the support is just sad.
None of what you promote (except for the garbage collection) are advantages of .NET, per se. They are advantages of the MS C# implementation. Rather than saddling people with yet another VM, MS could have added garbage collection into the native API and implemented C# purely native. What a fantastic benefit that would have been.
*sigh* I hate having to explain this every time. Makes me feel old.
What is interpreted? It's a native runtime reading a non-native set of instructions, deciding what to do with it in real-time, and then running native code to execute those instructions.
What is JIT compiling? Well, "Just-In-Time" compiling is compiling just-in-time to run. So it's a native runtime reading a non-native set of instructions, deciding what to do with it in real-time, and then running native code to execute those instructions.
JIT is a catchword euphamism. It came into being because "interpreted" became a dirty word when compilers became available to the masses. It does tend to infer a level of native code caching that straight "interpreters" didn't used to have. The reality is, though, that any good interpreted language has some amount of caching. In fact modern versions of some historically "interpreted" languages that now cache are in many cases labelled JIT compilers vice interpreters.
Keep in mind too that JIT compiler caching, even for the most state-of-the-art bytecode languages, isn't as efficient as many people like to think. Many language structures and primitives require re-"compiling" each time they are encountered.
The reality is, JIT "compiling" is simply a somewhat more efficient interpreter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Runtime
You've been writing .net for how long and you didn't know it was interpreted bytecode? I think I can just rest my case right now.
Delphi, C++ Builder, and the free cousin Lazarus are great tools for this. Lazarus is making some great cross-platform strides too. As a bonus, when you're done, you have real code. :)
.net co-exist with Javascript and HTML5? I think the whippersnappers are indeed lacking your experience. They haven't yet found anything to smoke that even comes close to your stash.
Your signature says it all... suckers... er, I meant government contracts.
Unfair = "not conforming to approved standards, as of justice, honesty, or ethics" - the statement was not unjust, certainly not dishonest, and unless you make money writing C++ compilers, it wasn't unethical. Please, by all means, tell all the .net programmers out there to get real jobs.
Of course .NET was a mistake. It had all the drawbacks of an interpreted system with none of the benefits. Inherent cross-platform run-anywhere ability which was Java's purpose from the beginning was never intended for .net. Cross-platform is the only consideration that makes interpreted code worth the cost in resources. .NET was a needless (read useless) distraction, and the only "benefit" I can perceive is an across-the-board requirement for people to purchase more powerful hardware to accomplish the same goals.
There's never been any question I've had about Ubuntu that couldn't be answered with about thirty seconds worth of grepping around the internet. That is, unless it was so esoteric that no pocket guide would have the answer anyway. The reality is, pocket guides like this just aren't relevant in today's environment. Certainly not in a paper-print format. Searchable PDF is far more useful to begin with. I would definitely question the assertion he would have made more money with a traditional publisher. More likely you'd have seen the books lining the ninety-nine cent bargain bins in liquidation marts - that is if they weren't being trucked to recyclers sans covers.
There are more forums, wikis, blogs, and articles on Ubuntu than I could possibly read in a century. A pocket book on Ubuntu failing to make the author rich is newsworthy like a chocolate factory startup failing in Hershey Pennsylvania. My advice to the author is take the nine grand and run. I think he made out like a bandit on this.
You seem to think that corporations have a duty to provide you with everything you want. A person or group of people exercising their right not to so something is not censorship. The whole idea that Amazon, or anyone for that matter, who chooses not to sell something is breaking some sort of trust is ridiculous. It is up to Amazon's shareholders and board of directors to determine the policies on what they will or won't sell.
Feel free to complain to them if they don't sell what you want, that's part of business. But labelling it censorship and getting hot and bothered about them becoming totalitarian is ludicrous on its face. Hell, if a huge retailer is purposefully abandoning a market segment, this should be news for celebration. Wow, a huge company is ignoring market! Let's get some investors together and fill the market share and make scads of money doing it.
So, either complain to Amazon, or start your own business. It's not censorship when someone else decides not to sell something you want. It's censorship when someone comes into your house with a gun and says gimme your porn.
They and and we (Canadian Navy) use immarsat for internet & unclas VOIP
Unfortunately, Slackware hasn't carried GNOME since 2005. Mr. Volkerding dropped it because it was "too much work". There are other third party GNOME packagers for Slackware. However, GNOME isn't just a desktop - it needs support from underneath X for some things, so any set of GNOME packages makes changes to Slackware that are more or less compatible with a basic Slackware install. I used Dropline for a while, but came to the decision that I wanted my desktop to be officially supported on my distro, not an afterthought. And, in the end, the "one-man-distro" concept that Slackware is just wasn't enough any more.
This really made me sad. Slackware is the garage-built Apple II of the Linux world (I figure SLS was the Apple I). Unfortunately, Linux has moved on from what one person can really package together. Slackware losing GNOME was just a symptom of this larger issue. I know for a fact that many people have offered to help Mr. Volkerding with various aspects of Slackware. I know at least one of the major GNOME packagers for Slackware has offered to do all the GNOME work for Slackware. I myself have made the offer too. Mr. Volkerding just doesn't seem interested in a community for Slackware. As I said, a one-man garage OS just isn't enough, unfortunately.
I ended up standardizing on Debian for all my machines. I've ugraded two production machines across three versions of Debian now - it just works, always. Debian is conservative, which is perfect for production machines. And it has real package management.
Every time I see a new Slackware version it makes me sad. Like seeing an old man wheezing on for another birthday. I'd rather see it go now, than continue to bleed marketshare into complete irrelevancy.
Mixing high tech electronics with automotives has always struck me as the worst fusion of the old joke: "the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman is the used car salesman knows when he's lying". As an engineer it may seem like a good idea to you that the equipment is expensive, but how many mechanics are also engineers? Mechanics are often not even mechanics any more. They plug in the diagnostic and whatever it says is wrong, is what is wrong. Don't try and tell them that it doesn't make sense that a stretched timing belt is causing the shimmy coming from the front passenger wheel, darn it, that's what the computer says.
No, the reality is that the reason the equipment is expensive is so that dealerships have a corner on the market. Post-sales service is one of the largest sources of dealership income. Which, if you think about it, is a truly sad state of affairs. Besides politicians, what is the one thing people are often most cynical about? It's auto dealerships. Because no matter how educated the average person gets about the way a vehicle works, a clever desk manager can always tell you the mechanic in the back plugged in a diagnostic and it said the "[techspeak] board indicated the [techspeak] [techspeak] has failed which [techspeaks] your ignition, and this is caused by road salt erosion of your [techspeak] which is obviously not covered under the warranty".
No, making the test equipment expensive, or otherwise keeping it out of reach of the public is not the answer to either the technical issue of vehicle "safety" or the PR issue of cynical consumers. The answer is open standards, common test equipment, and education. This just doesn't do anything for dealership income, that's all.