You know, it all starts with a noble idea.... Stalin was probably a very noble man with some very cool ideas
Not at all. He pursued flawed axioms to their inevitable conclusions. A good illustration of why it's so important to examine any proposed axiom thoroughly.
Indeed, the submitter is incredibly vague about just what the heck it is he finds objectionable about the assignment, which leads me to suspect some idiot puritan nonsense instead of a real moral issue.
As an aside, "ending up like RMS" would hardly be anything to be ashamed of. The world would be a lot better off if more of us had the courage to take his route.
I wouldn't say I see it as unethical, on Novell's part at least. I'd say it was clueless.
I believe the Novell statement is basically honest, as honest as corporate statements ever are, at least. And I read it like this:
Novell wanted a deal on interoperability. MS played along, and managed to slip them a poison pill along with it. I don't think anyone at Novell intended to be played like this - but there's obviously some serious hardcore cluelessness at the pay scales where this deal got vetted and the decision made. As evidenced by the fact these people STILL don't see what the big deal is.
I think the point is that the RIAA seems to dislike counterclaims that most litigious bastards do. It's poorly supported in the submission, but is nonetheless likely true.
I'm sure he's a very smart guy - but his smarts have been focused on marketing and management, all along. He's never made any notable technical contribution to anything - this doesn't mean he's a technical know-nothing, by any means, I'm sure in comparison to Uncle Bob and Aunt Judy he could be called a computer genius. But I think the analogy to a hospital administrator is apt. Hospital administrators are usually doctors, and they do know more about medicine than the average patient for certain - but they're doctors whose true talents lay in other areas, in management and marketing, and they aren't the people you want to turn to when you need serious medical knowledge.
You might try making a FAQ entry.
Most people won't read it before they speak, of course, but that way when they speak your reply can be much quicker - simply a pointer to the FAQ.
Bill doesn't know personal computers any better than the average hospital administrator knows the human immune system. And I'd bet you that when someone does make the next breakthrough in understanding and controlling the human immune system, that someone will not be a hospital administrator.
I'd also bet that at least one hospital administrator will believe he did it though.
Very good post, and very good points... BUT you forgot to mention that you can also run the exact same 27 year old binary the grandparent poster mentioned, under DosEmu, as well.;)
Not possible - no one supports that old version. If there are any important fixes (not just security, anything) they are always for the latest version. Open source people don't bother supporting older versions...;-)
Both those approaches are sometimes used and sometimes work, but mostly just add new crud.
Sadly for MS, they can't avoid it without changing the industry in ways they don't want to change. Source compatibility is a much better solution technically - but it doesn't work when the majority of your ecosystem is mushware-only.
Oh I think it's deeper than that. They have FAR more money and talent than the job requires. Their corporate culture is, however, deeply incompatible with the notion of putting out a "quality product."
2. Even if you do know every policy of all of candidates, you're not going to agree with all of the policies of any one candidate. This is a feature of the electoral system folding politics into two parties. Until the electoral system is reformed the best you can possibly do is vote on broad general principles.
You can't even do that, since the two parties have no broad general principles, aside from the ones they agree completely on, of course. If you happen to live in a voting district with a particular renegade candidate you might be an exception, but they're scarce.
You seem badly confused and self-contradictory to me.
The statement of mine you single out to endorse is a statement grounded in a philosophy of individual rights.
Then you go on to immediately endorse the contradictory principle of majority rule.
You need to pick one or the other. If majority rule, you can have no remaining objection to the law in question. It is, after all, the result of majority rule. It was enacted into law by the democratic process, and expresses the will of the majority that the disabled among us be accomodated in all public spaces.
I'm normally very sympathetic to the type of argument you and a number of others are making in this thread - no one should be required to undertake burdensome measures to accomodate others unwillingly. But in this case, I think you're all wrong. Because this doesn't require any extraordinary or burdensome measures at all - it only requires that people purportedly offering services through a web site in fact do that. HTML was designed for accessibility from the ground up, and if your site isn't accessible YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
If it works on linux now I'll stand corrected, been awhile since I tried it there.
It definitely doesn't work on Mac, The commands are there, but they don't do anything.
Were software still considered beyond the bounds of copyright and similar laws, it's true that software producers could not be required to release source code, could and would attempt to hide the software in opaque binaries and so on, of course.
It would also be perfectly legal to decompile, reverse engineer, patch, and distribute patched versions, on the other hand. Without any ability to prevent third party modification and distribution legally there was no profit motive behind locking up the code in the first place. If you look at the history of software, for a long time it was not generally considered copyrightable, or sellable per se, and no one had motive to lock it up - quite the opposite, producing software was an expense for hardware manufacturers, who had to provide it in order to sell their hardware. In that situation, it's in the hardware makers interest to keep it open and modifiable, as the more their customers build on the base they provide, the more powerful and valuable their hardware becomes.
Only when copyright started being applied, and software started being viewed as a good to be sold in and of itself, this changed, and computer users found themselves being increasingly locked out of their software and rendered helpless to modify their own machines. That's when Stallman became concerned and started the work that led to the GNU GPL - a legal 'hack' Stallman came up with to make the best of a bad situation.
Then why does he copyright all his stuff instead of releasing it into the public domain free of copyright?
Because, all the fashionable slashdot trolling to the contrary, he's an eminently practical man. If he released it PD he knows someone would just grab it, modify it a little, and close it off. He knows this because he learned the hard way - this was done with much of his early work.
He'd like to change copyright law, but being unable at least for the moment to do that, he came up with a way to hack copyright law to serve his purposes instead.
Sadly, Opera won't either, unless you're on Win32. Which is why I use firefox now, as I no longer use Windows on any machine. Back in the days when I still used Windows, however, I considered Opera the best browser. Particularly version 3.62 IIRC, which could be fit entirely on a floppy disk.
Re:Definitely has uses but..
on
Oracle Linux?
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· Score: 1
Yes, dare I say it, for sheer performance they'd be better off doing a custom version of freedos, not linux.
But linux is a good buzzword for marketing right now, and I imagine it's rather hard to find good assembler guys these days. Plus it's a lot easier to support multiple architectures this way, and I'm sure they have customers using serious non-x86 hardware to worry about.
Nvidia is a closed-source company, but they make good products.
You obviously either have a very different definition of 'good' than I would recognise, or (possibly) you have a very narrow range of products you'll accept for comparison. Nvidia is relatively 'good' if you are comparing only their recent high-end cards to ATIs recent high-end cards I suppose.
They aren't putting out anything that I would consider better than a Matrox G550 or Intel onboard video, or even an older ATI Radeon, however.
Stop villainizing Nvidia and evangilizing this open-source madness to everyone.
Stop obfuscating issues and using baggage-laden language to smear those of us that disagree with you. There's no 'villainizing' - there's a company that's being bullheadedly stupid and causing us inconvenience in the process. Given that the same actions that annoy us also cost them money, it makes perfect sense for us to be vocal about it. There's also no 'evangelising' - understanding and caring about technology, including the social aspects of technology, doesn't make one a religious nut. Sticking your head in the sand doesn't make you more practical either, by the way.
I use Linux (Arch distro - go Arch!) and the hated "closed-source" driver from NVidia because THEY make their cards and THEY make the best drivers for them.
Hmm this is the same driver in which a root exploit, available to both local and remote attackers, was reported in the very article we're discussing, and you still think it's the 'best driver?' Sorry, you sound like the religious nut here - clinging to your emotionally fulfilling conclusion and the evidence be damned. Fact is, because you're running that driver, your system is vulnerable, has been vulnerable as long as you've been using it, will remain vulnerable for some time, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
No, that's not what I would call a good driver at all.
Anyone worried about open-source to this degree, just don't buy an NVidia card already.
You can bet I won't. However, I still have to support crap I would never buy sometimes.
Trade secrets are money makers, and you can't definitively say that opening their source wouldn't give away some trade secrets or algorithms that keep NVidia at the cutting edge of video card production.
Yeah, I can. That's a bullshit argument, and it's always been a bullshit argument. First no one wants their drivers. We want the interface specs so we can write our own drivers. big difference. And even if that weren't the case, there's nothing the competitors could learn from the source code they couldn't learn from stepping through the blob in a debugger, and any competitor that is the least bit curious about it has already done that.
The official reason Nvidia gives for not releasing the code is that no one outside their folks could possibly write and maintain a good driver. Another obviously bogus argument.
Probably the real motivation is to keep the tricks they use to cheat on benchmarks secret. Now you can argue that is a 'trade secret' which helps keep them at the 'cutting edge' of marketing to a particular, lucrative segment of the market, and I'll agree with it, but it has nothing to do with technology development per se, and it wouldn't even be directly threatened by opening the interface specifications so proper drivers could be written by third parties. Furthermore, if one of these companies ever pulls their head out of their tail and quits lying to their customers like this, they could even turn that into a marketing advantage rather than a problem. The press doesn't put the issue in front of the buyers face now, because it's not a distinguishing feature, but if one company quit doing it in a verifiable way and spent a little time getting that into the press it would become one.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. He pursued flawed axioms to their inevitable conclusions. A good illustration of why it's so important to examine any proposed axiom thoroughly.
Wonderful axioms if you wish to emulate sociopaths.
Just because many common axioms are flawed doesn't mean they all are.
'Don't murder' works pretty well.
Indeed, the submitter is incredibly vague about just what the heck it is he finds objectionable about the assignment, which leads me to suspect some idiot puritan nonsense instead of a real moral issue.
As an aside, "ending up like RMS" would hardly be anything to be ashamed of. The world would be a lot better off if more of us had the courage to take his route.
I wouldn't say I see it as unethical, on Novell's part at least. I'd say it was clueless.
I believe the Novell statement is basically honest, as honest as corporate statements ever are, at least. And I read it like this:
Novell wanted a deal on interoperability. MS played along, and managed to slip them a poison pill along with it. I don't think anyone at Novell intended to be played like this - but there's obviously some serious hardcore cluelessness at the pay scales where this deal got vetted and the decision made. As evidenced by the fact these people STILL don't see what the big deal is.
I think the point is that the RIAA seems to dislike counterclaims that most litigious bastards do. It's poorly supported in the submission, but is nonetheless likely true.
I'm sure he's a very smart guy - but his smarts have been focused on marketing and management, all along. He's never made any notable technical contribution to anything - this doesn't mean he's a technical know-nothing, by any means, I'm sure in comparison to Uncle Bob and Aunt Judy he could be called a computer genius. But I think the analogy to a hospital administrator is apt. Hospital administrators are usually doctors, and they do know more about medicine than the average patient for certain - but they're doctors whose true talents lay in other areas, in management and marketing, and they aren't the people you want to turn to when you need serious medical knowledge.
You might try making a FAQ entry. Most people won't read it before they speak, of course, but that way when they speak your reply can be much quicker - simply a pointer to the FAQ.
Bill doesn't know personal computers any better than the average hospital administrator knows the human immune system. And I'd bet you that when someone does make the next breakthrough in understanding and controlling the human immune system, that someone will not be a hospital administrator. I'd also bet that at least one hospital administrator will believe he did it though.
It's modded funny because slashcode does a very good job of selecting fixated morons to be moderators.
Very good post, and very good points... BUT you forgot to mention that you can also run the exact same 27 year old binary the grandparent poster mentioned, under DosEmu, as well. ;)
Nonsense. Just use Debian.
Both those approaches are sometimes used and sometimes work, but mostly just add new crud. Sadly for MS, they can't avoid it without changing the industry in ways they don't want to change. Source compatibility is a much better solution technically - but it doesn't work when the majority of your ecosystem is mushware-only.
Oh I think it's deeper than that. They have FAR more money and talent than the job requires. Their corporate culture is, however, deeply incompatible with the notion of putting out a "quality product."
I certainly agree with the concern about 'hate speech' legislation. But in this case, TFA is, at best, badly misinformed.
You can't even do that, since the two parties have no broad general principles, aside from the ones they agree completely on, of course. If you happen to live in a voting district with a particular renegade candidate you might be an exception, but they're scarce.
True, but a lie by omission nonetheless. You need to add the words "or Republican."
You seem badly confused and self-contradictory to me.
The statement of mine you single out to endorse is a statement grounded in a philosophy of individual rights.
Then you go on to immediately endorse the contradictory principle of majority rule.
You need to pick one or the other. If majority rule, you can have no remaining objection to the law in question. It is, after all, the result of majority rule. It was enacted into law by the democratic process, and expresses the will of the majority that the disabled among us be accomodated in all public spaces.
I'm normally very sympathetic to the type of argument you and a number of others are making in this thread - no one should be required to undertake burdensome measures to accomodate others unwillingly. But in this case, I think you're all wrong. Because this doesn't require any extraordinary or burdensome measures at all - it only requires that people purportedly offering services through a web site in fact do that. HTML was designed for accessibility from the ground up, and if your site isn't accessible YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
If it works on linux now I'll stand corrected, been awhile since I tried it there. It definitely doesn't work on Mac, The commands are there, but they don't do anything.
It's not contradictory at all.
Were software still considered beyond the bounds of copyright and similar laws, it's true that software producers could not be required to release source code, could and would attempt to hide the software in opaque binaries and so on, of course.
It would also be perfectly legal to decompile, reverse engineer, patch, and distribute patched versions, on the other hand. Without any ability to prevent third party modification and distribution legally there was no profit motive behind locking up the code in the first place. If you look at the history of software, for a long time it was not generally considered copyrightable, or sellable per se, and no one had motive to lock it up - quite the opposite, producing software was an expense for hardware manufacturers, who had to provide it in order to sell their hardware. In that situation, it's in the hardware makers interest to keep it open and modifiable, as the more their customers build on the base they provide, the more powerful and valuable their hardware becomes.
Only when copyright started being applied, and software started being viewed as a good to be sold in and of itself, this changed, and computer users found themselves being increasingly locked out of their software and rendered helpless to modify their own machines. That's when Stallman became concerned and started the work that led to the GNU GPL - a legal 'hack' Stallman came up with to make the best of a bad situation.
Because, all the fashionable slashdot trolling to the contrary, he's an eminently practical man. If he released it PD he knows someone would just grab it, modify it a little, and close it off. He knows this because he learned the hard way - this was done with much of his early work.
He'd like to change copyright law, but being unable at least for the moment to do that, he came up with a way to hack copyright law to serve his purposes instead.
Sadly, Opera won't either, unless you're on Win32. Which is why I use firefox now, as I no longer use Windows on any machine. Back in the days when I still used Windows, however, I considered Opera the best browser. Particularly version 3.62 IIRC, which could be fit entirely on a floppy disk.
Yes, dare I say it, for sheer performance they'd be better off doing a custom version of freedos, not linux.
But linux is a good buzzword for marketing right now, and I imagine it's rather hard to find good assembler guys these days. Plus it's a lot easier to support multiple architectures this way, and I'm sure they have customers using serious non-x86 hardware to worry about.
You obviously either have a very different definition of 'good' than I would recognise, or (possibly) you have a very narrow range of products you'll accept for comparison. Nvidia is relatively 'good' if you are comparing only their recent high-end cards to ATIs recent high-end cards I suppose.
They aren't putting out anything that I would consider better than a Matrox G550 or Intel onboard video, or even an older ATI Radeon, however.
Stop obfuscating issues and using baggage-laden language to smear those of us that disagree with you. There's no 'villainizing' - there's a company that's being bullheadedly stupid and causing us inconvenience in the process. Given that the same actions that annoy us also cost them money, it makes perfect sense for us to be vocal about it. There's also no 'evangelising' - understanding and caring about technology, including the social aspects of technology, doesn't make one a religious nut. Sticking your head in the sand doesn't make you more practical either, by the way.
Hmm this is the same driver in which a root exploit, available to both local and remote attackers, was reported in the very article we're discussing, and you still think it's the 'best driver?' Sorry, you sound like the religious nut here - clinging to your emotionally fulfilling conclusion and the evidence be damned. Fact is, because you're running that driver, your system is vulnerable, has been vulnerable as long as you've been using it, will remain vulnerable for some time, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
No, that's not what I would call a good driver at all.
You can bet I won't. However, I still have to support crap I would never buy sometimes.
Yeah, I can. That's a bullshit argument, and it's always been a bullshit argument. First no one wants their drivers. We want the interface specs so we can write our own drivers. big difference. And even if that weren't the case, there's nothing the competitors could learn from the source code they couldn't learn from stepping through the blob in a debugger, and any competitor that is the least bit curious about it has already done that.
The official reason Nvidia gives for not releasing the code is that no one outside their folks could possibly write and maintain a good driver. Another obviously bogus argument.
Probably the real motivation is to keep the tricks they use to cheat on benchmarks secret. Now you can argue that is a 'trade secret' which helps keep them at the 'cutting edge' of marketing to a particular, lucrative segment of the market, and I'll agree with it, but it has nothing to do with technology development per se, and it wouldn't even be directly threatened by opening the interface specifications so proper drivers could be written by third parties. Furthermore, if one of these companies ever pulls their head out of their tail and quits lying to their customers like this, they could even turn that into a marketing advantage rather than a problem. The press doesn't put the issue in front of the buyers face now, because it's not a distinguishing feature, but if one company quit doing it in a verifiable way and spent a little time getting that into the press it would become one.