Still, given the choice between an enormous ugly expensive bug and an enormous (and albeit slightly more ugly) free bug... I'll go for the free bug.
Sigh... a part of me wants to say "Is that the best we as computer professionals can do?"
before getting all riled up, though, I think it's plausible that some of the problems are due to business people thinking their company, rather than the competition, should be the one making money by solving people's needs, which forces them to serve people's need less well.
But let's leave that as speculation;-)
The real point I want to make: it would be really nice if everybody could converge to some agreed-upon subset of (La)TeX for producing documents, with some well-crafted wysiwyg frontend for producing.tex files. Then, having people send pdf files around would make sure we wouldn't have any inconsistency.
Maybe the application should produce.tar.gz files with source, pdf, and (maybe?) version tracking, such that it's easier for people to attach "the file they open in $EDITOR" and have useful results on the recipient end...
When we're talking in crypto-mode---as we are, made evident by the references to SFTP and SLL---the words "plain-text" refer not to ascii vs. base64 vs. bin2hex encoding, but whether the data is encrypted or not.
AFAIK, FTP doesn't have any provisions for encryption.
Your point is orthogonal to that, so your "Wrong" is wrong: your parent is not wrong. Your point is true, however: FTP does have issues with line endings etc.; rule of thumb: use binary for everything and recode newlines on the client side if need be.
Using SFTP over an already secure network will only slow things down greatly.
Sending data unencrypted through the air is not what I consider "secure". So, while true, this point is not particularly relevant (I think).
Original research is unacceptable on WP, as a matter of course.
And so is anything that doesn't have a source with a good reputation for fact checking to back it up.
Which I find strange in the case of original mathematical theorems--the proofs verify them, why do you care who wrote the proof? (except that it might be an interesting piece of math history trivia.)
I think it's intended to maximize advertisement revenue, and who gives a shit who wants to come and look at the stories?
As such, Unicode is neither necessary nor desirable.
Right, because no american would want to discuss prices in pound sterling, yen or euro, right? No true american would write "turoru wa sugoi ja arimasen" in hiragana, right? ("turoru" is my best transliteration of "troll").
If it were supported, foreigners and trolls would start posting all kinds of diacritical marks and funny symbols and weird junk like that, which is not wanted.
Correction: which you don't want. I want "€" rather than "euro". I want ">" rather than "greater than". And I don't particularly like remembering HTML entity names for the characters I want to use to express my point.
If Europeans want a Unicode-friendly forum where they can use foreign currency symbols and letters with funny looking little hats overtop and whatnot, they can jolly well start their own site.
Right, because Metcalfe's law says the value of a network increases the more fragmented and small it is, right?
We don't want it here.
You don't want it here. I do. I think we're 1-1. But slashdot is not a democracy; I think the operators will go for greater advertisement revenue by including us foreigners.
Don't worry, we won't come charging at you with a hockey stick or &entity; or whatever we got.
No, the real problem with keyboards is the NumLock key.
Really? It's never a problem for me.
I think the really really real problems of keyboards are:
Very little use of the thumbs: my thumbs operate the space key. Maybe the Alt keys. That's about 0.5 or 1.5 keys per finger. Meanwhile, my index fingers handle "4 5 p y u i k x" and "6 7 f g d h b m" (I use the Dvorak layout) for a whopping 8 keys per finger.
The arrow keys are far away from the home row (i.e. "asdf jkl;"), meaning you have to move far to get there, which takes time. Move the arrow and cursor control keys under the thumbs.
With software, we could make it easier to type the same letter twice (as in the "tt" in letter): introduce a new key, placed on both sides of the board (kinda' like shift/alt/ctrl) which repeats the last key. That way, you can alternate between not just fingers but (friggin') hands while repeating the same key.
Keyboards aren't designed to fit the anatomy of human hands. Note how your pinky is about two-thirds (or maybe 70%) the length of your middle finger. Are the keys on your keyboard correspondingly closer to or further away from your hands?
Put away your laptop, and let your hands rest on the table in a natural position. Measure the distance between your index fingers. Next, measure the distance between "f" and "j" on your keyboard. Is it smaller? Much smaller? Incredibly much much smaller?
The Kinesis Ergo Elan keyboard fixes some of this. Do yourself a big favor and get one.
(I'm not a paid shill, but a very happy customer.)
<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!! <Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key <Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!! <Judge-Mental> fuck me
Why do you think China is kicking our asses so hard? Yes, it is partially lax environmental laws there
While that may be true---I don't know---it's interesting to note what Hans Rosling pointed out in one of his TED talks*, as countries get wealthier and decrease their infant mortality, they all start emitting more CO2.
That is, no country knows how to get rich without polluting. China's getting rich is not more "at the expense of the environment" than anyone else's getting rich.
I very much like reading about cool new open source technology. Sure, the law, politics and biotech stories are cool too, but cool new tech stuff is (for me) the real meat of slashdot, which is sadly underrepresented these days.
Yes, rebooting is annoying, especially for important servers, but doesn't it make more sense to be 100% sure that the changes you're making aren't destabilizing the system (doubly for servers) than that few minutes of down time rebooting costs?
Some systems you don't want down, ever. Emergency phone service, nuclear power plant control systems, air traffic control systems. Generally, if you don't lose revenue but lives, don't shut it down.
Also, for some very important operations, one must imagine the operators have a test/staging server where they can test the changes before deploying on production systems.
But the most important point: we're being rationalistic instead of empirical! It's possible to collect the numbers; that is, measure the downtime for each candidate approach, predict future downtime (and even better: loss of revenue), and choose the most profitable approach.
If it's important (enough) to know, do the science.
In the broadest strokes, the GPL isn't that different from a EULA. The main difference is the scope of the agreement.
Meh, no. The GPL isn't an agreement.
BIG WARNING: I'm not a lawyer. I haven't read much law, but I try to soak up some principles from discussions on slashdot, talks by Lessig, Moglen and Stallman, etc.
The way copyright works is like this: you write some code. Everyone else is forbidden from doing certain things with that code, for a limited time. The GPL is a formal way of saying "I give you permission to do it anyways".
One of the things the GPL gives you permission to do is redistribute the binaries and source. It doesn't give you permission to redistribute the binaries alone*.
Note a key point, here: the GPL doesn't take any rights away from you that weren't already taken away by copyright law.
Next consider EULAs: they're contracts. They say "we will offer you permission to use this software, if in return you promise us to $TERMS_AND_CONDITIONS". (For instance, according to Bradley Kuhn (in his talks available on audio-video.gnu.org) states that as a term of the FrontPage EULA, you're not allowed to use the program to create pages which say bad things about Microsoft.)
One is a give. The other is a give-and-take.
I think the big deal about this is that with EULAs, contract law comes into play. That means the "buyer" (the party not creating the contract) has to have a reasonable chance of understanding it; it has to be negotiable; the parties must know what it says (or have had a reasonable opportunity to know what it says) before agreeing to it.
There's also a point to be made about contracts being for the benefit of the signing parties, whereas copyright is for the benefit of society. That might create some interesting legal implications.
I do get your point: licenses and EULAs are pieces of text that say what you can and can't do with the software in question. But, in a legal sense, they're different. I think it's valuable to be able to make this distinction, and have a way of thinking about the implications of the difference.
The sound byte that only 10% of the workstations have been migrated in X years doesn't scale to mean that it will take 9 * X more years to complete to rest of them. I know you didn't state this, but the LimuxWatch blog implies this in many of their schedule slip lists.
Yeah, everyone knows things are expected to take O(X log X) time with a slip list.
Windows 95 is a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
And if you're going to argue that, you might as well argue that Microsoft open up Windows or Intel layout the insides of its Atom processors for the world to see. [...] you have to draw the line somewhere or apply to everyone.
Note that if we're talking about companies being anticompetitive, "everyone" is the set of market players which have the ability to behave anticompetitively.
If we talk about, say, tying music players to online music stores, "everyone" is {Apple}. I don't know much about the Zune--does Microsoft have a music store? If they do, do they also have a big enough market presence to behave anti-competitively in that space? No.
I don't know why you picked Intel and Microsoft as examples, but there are cases to be made that they have the ability to engage in monopolistic behavior. For that reason, one should at least keep an eye on what they're doing; maybe even modify their behavior in ways that encourage competition (or in other ways which avoid the bad effects of monopolies).
Say I'm littering in your front yard. Then you start playing obnoxiously loud music in the middle of the night.
Should I be barred from suing you for being a nuisance, just because I'm a nuisance myself?
If you argue yes, I think the reasoning becomes even thinner than I think it has to be for that case when we're talking about this:
One party does something bad towards not any one particular party but society as a whole. Then, another party points to the first party and says "they're doing it, so we can do it to" and go on to do something bad against society.
True, Microsoft isn't on the moral high ground, but that doesn't excuse IBM. And it doesn't make it incorrect for Microsoft to point it out. Just... the weird kind of funny.
disclaimer: I don't know the facts of the case. I don't know whether IBM is being anticompetitive. I'm not well-enough informed to hold an informed opinion, so I won't state one. I'm just saying that if IBM is being anticompetitive...
Slashdot Mirror
Still, given the choice between an enormous ugly expensive bug and an enormous (and albeit slightly more ugly) free bug... I'll go for the free bug.
Sigh... a part of me wants to say "Is that the best we as computer professionals can do?"
before getting all riled up, though, I think it's plausible that some of the problems are due to business people thinking their company, rather than the competition, should be the one making money by solving people's needs, which forces them to serve people's need less well.
But let's leave that as speculation ;-)
The real point I want to make: it would be really nice if everybody could converge to some agreed-upon subset of (La)TeX for producing documents, with some well-crafted wysiwyg frontend for producing .tex files. Then, having people send pdf files around would make sure we wouldn't have any inconsistency.
Maybe the application should produce .tar.gz files with source, pdf, and (maybe?) version tracking, such that it's easier for people to attach "the file they open in $EDITOR" and have useful results on the recipient end...
Oh well, I can dream, can't I?
try the Windows command line FTP
I vote AYE on this! Everyone knows that BSD code is rock solid ;-)
SFTP [...] SSL [...] FTP is a plain-text protocol
Wrong. FTP has a binary mode.
When we're talking in crypto-mode---as we are, made evident by the references to SFTP and SLL---the words "plain-text" refer not to ascii vs. base64 vs. bin2hex encoding, but whether the data is encrypted or not.
AFAIK, FTP doesn't have any provisions for encryption.
Your point is orthogonal to that, so your "Wrong" is wrong: your parent is not wrong. Your point is true, however: FTP does have issues with line endings etc.; rule of thumb: use binary for everything and recode newlines on the client side if need be.
Using SFTP over an already secure network will only slow things down greatly.
Sending data unencrypted through the air is not what I consider "secure". So, while true, this point is not particularly relevant (I think).
after all, something which has been "good enough" for a couple of decades.
I think memory protection was the killer feature of XP (for everyone coming from w98).
Maybe Microsoft should sell w7 on MemoryGuard Plus, "protects your memory even better" ;-)
Original research is unacceptable on WP, as a matter of course.
And so is anything that doesn't have a source with a good reputation for fact checking to back it up.
Which I find strange in the case of original mathematical theorems--the proofs verify them, why do you care who wrote the proof? (except that it might be an interesting piece of math history trivia.)
Women with larger breasts *and* the nicest butts have boyfriends.
There's the real problem :(
She is therefore, in my mind, entitled to the revenues generated -- some or all -- from the unlawful distribution of her work.
Which amounts to $80,000 per copy of the newspaper, right? ;-)
I'd like to introduce to my friend, h|tler:
<h|tler> HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU TELL THAT I'M 13 BY LOOKING AT WHAT I'M WRITEING????????????????
(From http://bash.org/?14207)
The slashdot filter had me remove a bunch of question marks. Yes, there are even more in the original.
Slashdot is intended to be an American forum.
I think it's intended to maximize advertisement revenue, and who gives a shit who wants to come and look at the stories?
As such, Unicode is neither necessary nor desirable.
Right, because no american would want to discuss prices in pound sterling, yen or euro, right? No true american would write "turoru wa sugoi ja arimasen" in hiragana, right? ("turoru" is my best transliteration of "troll").
If it were supported, foreigners and trolls would start posting all kinds of diacritical marks and funny symbols and weird junk like that, which is not wanted.
Correction: which you don't want. I want "€" rather than "euro". I want ">" rather than "greater than". And I don't particularly like remembering HTML entity names for the characters I want to use to express my point.
If Europeans want a Unicode-friendly forum where they can use foreign currency symbols and letters with funny looking little hats overtop and whatnot, they can jolly well start their own site.
Right, because Metcalfe's law says the value of a network increases the more fragmented and small it is, right?
We don't want it here.
You don't want it here. I do. I think we're 1-1. But slashdot is not a democracy; I think the operators will go for greater advertisement revenue by including us foreigners.
Don't worry, we won't come charging at you with a hockey stick or &entity; or whatever we got.
Wilkommen! Get your kraut-ass back home. Is that how it works?
As a half-german, I resent your half-hearted mockery of my half-people!
It's "Iz zatt ze vai it wuhhkz?", bitte!
Ah, evil.
We don't need to be evil, we're the telephone com... wait!
What was that line again?
Or he's behind the Great Firewall of China
American peopre have big erection! Brack man win! Europeen peopre have big erection too! Why onry Chinese peopre not have erection? (scnr)
$199 == [A^]£199 == [a^]199
I take it the "A circumflex" is a shorthand for the empty string, and "a circumflex" is a shorthand for the Euro sign?
I take it utf-8 is still broken on slashdot?
Actually, just over half of the nipples are found on men. Check yourself.
Not if I limit myself to the nipples I have touched...
No, the real problem with keyboards is the NumLock key.
Really? It's never a problem for me.
I think the really really real problems of keyboards are:
The Kinesis Ergo Elan keyboard fixes some of this. Do yourself a big favor and get one.
(I'm not a paid shill, but a very happy customer.)
Caps lock will be the end of unintended shouting
I would like you to meet my friend, Khassaki:
<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key
<Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> fuck me
(From http://www.bash.org/?835030)
Why do you think China is kicking our asses so hard? Yes, it is partially lax environmental laws there
While that may be true---I don't know---it's interesting to note what Hans Rosling pointed out in one of his TED talks*, as countries get wealthier and decrease their infant mortality, they all start emitting more CO2.
That is, no country knows how to get rich without polluting. China's getting rich is not more "at the expense of the environment" than anyone else's getting rich.
* http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html. I don't know which of the three videos, but watch them all because they're good ;-)
inherently includes massive use of other peoples creations.
That doesn't mean they don't have the right to use it, which is really what piracy is about.
Sure, in practice, that's not much of the stuff that's on youtube, but "Social networking video site" only means "pirate site" in practice ;-)
Thanks, sdasher, for submitting this story.
I very much like reading about cool new open source technology. Sure, the law, politics and biotech stories are cool too, but cool new tech stuff is (for me) the real meat of slashdot, which is sadly underrepresented these days.
Thanks for submitting, much appreciated :)
Yes, rebooting is annoying, especially for important servers, but doesn't it make more sense to be 100% sure that the changes you're making aren't destabilizing the system (doubly for servers) than that few minutes of down time rebooting costs?
Some systems you don't want down, ever. Emergency phone service, nuclear power plant control systems, air traffic control systems. Generally, if you don't lose revenue but lives, don't shut it down.
Also, for some very important operations, one must imagine the operators have a test/staging server where they can test the changes before deploying on production systems.
But the most important point: we're being rationalistic instead of empirical! It's possible to collect the numbers; that is, measure the downtime for each candidate approach, predict future downtime (and even better: loss of revenue), and choose the most profitable approach.
If it's important (enough) to know, do the science.
In the broadest strokes, the GPL isn't that different from a EULA. The main difference is the scope of the agreement.
Meh, no. The GPL isn't an agreement.
BIG WARNING: I'm not a lawyer. I haven't read much law, but I try to soak up some principles from discussions on slashdot, talks by Lessig, Moglen and Stallman, etc.
The way copyright works is like this: you write some code. Everyone else is forbidden from doing certain things with that code, for a limited time. The GPL is a formal way of saying "I give you permission to do it anyways".
One of the things the GPL gives you permission to do is redistribute the binaries and source. It doesn't give you permission to redistribute the binaries alone*.
Note a key point, here: the GPL doesn't take any rights away from you that weren't already taken away by copyright law.
Next consider EULAs: they're contracts. They say "we will offer you permission to use this software, if in return you promise us to $TERMS_AND_CONDITIONS". (For instance, according to Bradley Kuhn (in his talks available on audio-video.gnu.org) states that as a term of the FrontPage EULA, you're not allowed to use the program to create pages which say bad things about Microsoft.)
One is a give. The other is a give-and-take.
I think the big deal about this is that with EULAs, contract law comes into play. That means the "buyer" (the party not creating the contract) has to have a reasonable chance of understanding it; it has to be negotiable; the parties must know what it says (or have had a reasonable opportunity to know what it says) before agreeing to it.
There's also a point to be made about contracts being for the benefit of the signing parties, whereas copyright is for the benefit of society. That might create some interesting legal implications.
I do get your point: licenses and EULAs are pieces of text that say what you can and can't do with the software in question. But, in a legal sense, they're different. I think it's valuable to be able to make this distinction, and have a way of thinking about the implications of the difference.
The sound byte that only 10% of the workstations have been migrated in X years doesn't scale to mean that it will take 9 * X more years to complete to rest of them. I know you didn't state this, but the LimuxWatch blog implies this in many of their schedule slip lists.
Yeah, everyone knows things are expected to take O(X log X) time with a slip list.
Windows 95 is a
32-bit shell for a
16-bit extension to an
8-bit operating system designed for a
4-bit microprocessor by a
2-bit company that can't stand
one bit of competition.
(stolen from http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2003-May/018396.html)
Also, "two-bit" means "(1) cheap; gaudy; tawdry; or (2) Mediocre, inferior, or insignificant".
(stolen from http://www.yourdictionary.com/two-bit. Try to find the definition in-between all the ads.)
And if you're going to argue that, you might as well argue that Microsoft open up Windows or Intel layout the insides of its Atom processors for the world to see. [...] you have to draw the line somewhere or apply to everyone.
Note that if we're talking about companies being anticompetitive, "everyone" is the set of market players which have the ability to behave anticompetitively.
If we talk about, say, tying music players to online music stores, "everyone" is {Apple}. I don't know much about the Zune--does Microsoft have a music store? If they do, do they also have a big enough market presence to behave anti-competitively in that space? No.
I don't know why you picked Intel and Microsoft as examples, but there are cases to be made that they have the ability to engage in monopolistic behavior. For that reason, one should at least keep an eye on what they're doing; maybe even modify their behavior in ways that encourage competition (or in other ways which avoid the bad effects of monopolies).
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Yeah, but you know... they could be right.
Say I'm littering in your front yard. Then you start playing obnoxiously loud music in the middle of the night.
Should I be barred from suing you for being a nuisance, just because I'm a nuisance myself?
If you argue yes, I think the reasoning becomes even thinner than I think it has to be for that case when we're talking about this:
One party does something bad towards not any one particular party but society as a whole. Then, another party points to the first party and says "they're doing it, so we can do it to" and go on to do something bad against society.
True, Microsoft isn't on the moral high ground, but that doesn't excuse IBM. And it doesn't make it incorrect for Microsoft to point it out. Just... the weird kind of funny.
disclaimer: I don't know the facts of the case. I don't know whether IBM is being anticompetitive. I'm not well-enough informed to hold an informed opinion, so I won't state one. I'm just saying that if IBM is being anticompetitive...