Was anyone here there for the speech? What kind of reception did she get? I fear people's politeness sometimes doesn't let them express their true feelings. But it would have been cool if the whole audience had booed and hissed (personally, I find hissing to be a much more subtle and powerful audience response than booing).
Maybe it really wouldn't make a difference -- but I don't really think that these high-profile executives are really all that hard-skinned. They revel in the attention. Confronting such a public figure with your distaste for them is an important political statement. And they don't deserve to feel good about themselves.
And there's something comforting -- as in a passion play -- when a group of people can agree and express their common opinion of who is good and who is bad.
boycotting
them is fine but STEALING their copyrights through P2P networks is not justified.
Uh, P2P networks don't steal anyone's copyrights -- not even close. They may enable copyright infringement, but that's different from saying "now this copyright is mine".
The RIAA defrauds and coerces artists through their cartel into giving up their copyrights. If anyone is stealing copyrights, it's the RIAA. It most certainly isn't the the P2P networks.
The problem with Napster is you only find exactly what you are looking for. Unlike, say, radio, you never get what you didn't expect (but may like).
Music needs its own set of portals, ala/. -- and ones that aren't comemrcially aligned. Something might already exists... if someone has a pointer, that'd be cool.
Artists don't go into debt to the people who download their music, and they don't sign over their copyright for the privilege.
The downloaders may not be giving compensation that they might otherwise have given. But they aren't taking anything from the artists. And even if they are freeloaders, they aren't taking anything from anyone else either. The RIAA is taking money from consumers, and they don't even have the decency to give decent compensation to the people who make it possible.
Unfortunately none of the big web-hosting review sites have anything about VPS -- just shared hosts and colos. I found it hard to find information.
Anyway, for the same price at superb.net you do get root and access to install whatever the heck you want. I bet the $150 deal at Verio is more like what you want. But as I look at it, it doesn't actually say anything about root. Most of the other places are pretty explicit about that.
If you don't get root, it's not a very big step above a shared host. I guess you can do long-running processes.
Yeah, I can do anything and install any software I want. I'm using superb.net. I haven't been super-excited about them, but for the most part it's worked well -- I'm used to Debian, and I think part of the pain was simply getting used to Redhat (still don't like it, though). Verio offers the same service on FreeBSD for somewhat more.
A few people seem curious about this. I did a little research several months ago. Here's the places that looked decent:
http://www.asp-linux.com/en/services/hosting/power server.shtml
$65/mo -- a little sparse on information. I don't understand how
you can have a VPS with limited POP boxes or no SSL.
Maybe they just don't install it for you...?
http://www.vitalserver.com/prices/
$75/mo -- The website is a little sparse.
http://services.superb.net/sps/
$80/mo -- I've heard of them. Look competent. $90 when you pay
quarterly, $80 only if you pay yearly.
http://www.lightspeedhost.com/vps/detailed.html
$80/mo -- same limitations as asp-linux...?
http://www.1000island.net/virtual.htm
$100/mo -- Looks half-assed. They have a phone number listed
without an area code...
http://www.datapipe.com/privateserver.htm
$150/mo -- 10 IP address, reasonably cheap to get more.
http://home.verio.com/products/hosting/web/vps/vps standard.cfm
$150/mo -- FreeBSD (all others are Linux). Don't mention IP
addresses -- only one?
I don't really know how they do it, but a number of hosting companies offer VPSs -- like 32 virtual computers hosted with one computer. I have an account like this myself, and it's a fairly economical way to get a very flexible host.
It seems like this is the same kind of thing this person is talking about...? Is this more general in some way? What exactly is my host using anyway?
People have forgotten about the notion of "public". Things like 802.11b access should be public -- yes, they are not free, just like roads aren't free. But roads are free to use, and in a wise society stuff like 802.11b could be free to use -- because it would be a public resource.
It is quite true that charity cannot replace business. But public works can replace business. That would be really cool.
What it comes down to is that if you spend the majority of your time in a small handful of programs,
keyboard interfaces are far faster. If you are a casual/semicasual computer user (read: 95% of users), the
mouse is almost always faster.
95% sounds way off to me. Lots of people with no inclination to use computers end up using them 8 hours a day, because that's what their work entails. Just about everyone with an office job is in this position now.
Even cashiers use a computer extensively -- only we forget that's what the cash register is. And I have never seen a cash register with a mouse (though some -- not many -- have touch screens).
You can't do that sort of experiment scientifically without committing a great deal of time.
Tog is considering a novice user populace, one who hasn't become accustomed to their tools. But that's not a realistic test -- everyone who uses the computer much will become accustomed to their tools. If they don't use the computer much, then they don't even matter that much, because there isn't that much total time to be saved on the interface.
You want me to take a bunch of people who know Emacs and test their time doing some editing task against their time using a mouse-based editor? I don't need to bother with the experiment to tell you those people will be way, way faster in Emacs. And even if I did the experiment, it wouldn't mean anything, except maybe that people can become much faster at actions with experience.
If I was to take those people and force them to use particular tools for at least three months (if not more) for real tasks, and then test them, then I could say something about the efficiency of the interfaces. Otherwise the experiment means nothing to the average slashdotter who uses their tools extensively. In fact, it says little to the average person who uses a computer extensively -- which is a really large population.
Any experiment that doesn't take account of a human's ability to learn and fully assimilate seemingly nonintuitive actions is flawed. If you are creating an interface for a fire alarm, where a person might use it a few times in their lifetime, then the kinds of experiments Tog is using are appropriate. That ain't how computers are used.
Mental preparation time for the actual action is about 1.35s, but you have to mentally prepare
for an action regardless of whether it is a typing action, or a mousing action. We can ignore it to simplify
things.
This is where Tog seems to be crack, IMHO. He does take account of the mental preparation for the keystroke, but seems to think that there is no such preparation for the mousestroke -- or that it somehow occurs during the actual movement.
This is simply silly -- deciding what you want to do, and how you need to do it, is a constant for any interface that is at all natural.
Some say that a keyboard interface is not as natural as a mouse interface. But that's silly too -- as though there something natural about moving the mouse around and hitting menus. The visual interface tends to be more self-documenting. But for actions that are taken on a regular basis this isn't important -- actions like closing a window, opening a URL, searching for a string, copy, paste... yada yada yada, there are hundreds of these that we can easily keep in our heads if we use the computer often enough -- which is at least true for everyone here at slashdot, if not for every Mac user.
I think the interface that is best for the novice user is no longer being fair to the average computer user of today, who is not a novice (or at least does not want to be), and who uses their computer a great deal more. It's difficult for people to move from novice to experienced when they aren't naturally inclined to do so -- however, they would benefit from that transition, and they need that more than they need easy interfaces.
The keyboard interface that is analagous to the mouse interface might be what you get with M-x in Emacs, or tab completion on the command line. It's vaguely self-documenting, and not necessarily faster than a mouse-based interface. These are interfaces best served to deal with a very large array of options with which the user is not particularly familiar.
However, I find the keyboard vastly more reliable and general an interface than the mouse for any medium that is not strictly visual -- which is most of what I (and most people) use the computer for. By not visual, that would include language or symbol based... which can be visual too, but I can't think of the right word to distinguish them.
And, anyone who uses Mozilla constantly knows that it doesn't seem to free memory, ever... it grows and
grows. The "tabs" feature is great (so technically it's just the one "window" open) but unfortunately
closing a tab does not free any memory. I rarely restart Moz because I'd have to then re-open all the pages
I had going, etc...
Galeon, which of course has the same memory problems, has a nice feature of exiting with a session, so when you restart it all the same windows are open. Unfortunately your history gets lost, but that's usually not so bad.
Of course, better memory management would be better. But Galeon does what it can to make the instabilities less painful.
In a traditional kernel -- which is all Linus aspires to for the Linux kernel -- everything is basically a solved problem. There's lots of tweaking, and testing, and technical debates -- but there's really not anything all that interesting.
It is somewhat interesting, because the kernel is the foundation for everything else. Well, libc is nearly as basic. So what happens at that low level effects everything, whether you run KDE or Gnome or just the command line.
I can't remember where I read it (it might have been slashdot) but somebody recently was comparing
Microsoft currently to IBM in it's last years of domination in the industry.
There are a lot of things in this article that support that theory too. Particularly Microsoft's concentration
on proprietary protocols. Like the IBM of old Microsoft are trying to suck everything into their evil empire
and proprietize (if that's a word) everything they can... including the internet.
I dunno... IBM didn't invent the closed protocol, and closed protocols have succeded in the past. IBM bit off more than it could chew, but was already in decline anyway -- otherwise maybe it could have chewed up all its competition. It had done so before. MS has done so before.
Pretty much all history tells us there is: IBM tried something, and it failed.
MS might try and succede. It might try and fail. When it tries and fails, people will say, "hey, that's just like IBM". And MS will decline. But really, failure is failure. Closed protocols are not failure. Being a giant company is not failure. Being a giant company in decline is failure. Presenting closed protocols that no one uses is failure.
When that happens, MS will have failed. Not because it's just like IBM, but just because that stuff happens. When you lose something, you always find it in the last place you look. Failure precedes decline. These aren't grand patterns, they just are.
Part of the problem I see is that 3rd world nations aren't allowed to succede on their own terms.
If you look at what was happening in Nicaragua after the revolution, it was very impressive. Within a year they had increased literacy from something like 50% to 88% (admittedly, under a modest definition of literacy). They were providing health care, they were rebuilding a nation that had been thoroughly looted... they were building up their country faster than any of the "success stories" of today. They were doing so with justice -- they had armed their entire populace, and yet there was no rebellion: a very concrete measure of the satisfaction of citizens.
What did they get for it? The US pumped a ton of money to support the former death squads of the previous dictatorship, whose primary method of recruitment was kidnapping, and whose primary targets were civilians and hospitals. Eventually they tore the nation down.
Cuba, for all its flaws, has truly tried hard to do good for its citizens. And when you compare Cuba to other Carribean countries, it really hasn't done badly, because on the whole the Carribean nations are hellholes -- even the tourism-based nations tend to be incredibly poor outside of the tourist enclaves. Cuba provides good healthcare and has very high literacy. People aren't starving. And again, they were building up from an abismal dictatorship. They've remained in stasis for some time, but if they hadn't been constantly under attack maybe they'd have had a better chance of success.
And why has the United States hated Cuba so much? It's not the social policies -- there are far, far worse nations the US has supported. It's because Cuba offered an example of a country going it alone, and to a degree succeding. Even now, despite all that's happened, many people in Latin America look up to Cuba as a model of true independance.
Personally, I think a lot of what has happened in Yugoslavia has come from the same motivation -- unlike the other Eastern European countries, Yugoslavia had real potential to continue real independance after the fall of the USSR. While the US and European countries were much more subtle about it, many of the events there have been very suspicious. And when the dust settled, it's interesting that the Bosnian currency and national bank is directly controlled by Western European nations and the US.
As I look to current globalization, it's not trade or homogeneity that bothers me -- it's a system of rules that is created purely by the international elite, enforced by that elite, and thus is for the benefit of that elite. They want there to be only one economic game around -- one economy for the whole world, no diversity, no attempt for independance. I don't think they'll ever let a nation build itself up. They'll let a nation sell itself off, so they can come in and build it up (and then own it)... but they have to have their cut, whether it is deserved or not.
One, overly strict working conditions, even when enforced by the military, does not constitute coersion to
work. Coersion implies that the workers were forcibly made to work there, which is clearly not the case;
they chose to work there.
That's so stupid, it's funny. But, you know, in that sad, depressing, "my god, how blindingly single-minded people can be" sort of way.
Moreso than AIX, people have been reading the BSD VM code for a long time. It seems to be regarded very highly, and its design has been stable for quite some time.
So why doesn't Linux just copy BSD?
The code here seems rather incidental, it's the design that is more important. But why not copy a good design? Or do one (or both) of the contending VMs do so?
Private industry takes liability for their Identification and Authentication process. Government just
shrugs and says, "Oops, we messed up." While private industry issuing certs and not taking liability is no
better than government (and, as you indicated, probably worse because of cost), private industry with
liability is a good thing.
Yes, but the government has much more control over law enforcement. Forged government IDs are directly investigated and prosecuted by the issuer -- the government.
Ultimately, the government is a political system, where private companies are commercial systems. I think political systems can be superior in some circumstances -- particularly where a there's a central authority, universal accessibility, and long-term reliability (i.e., not reliant on economic factors). Or, at least, where there's a need for all those things.
We already mostly have this, because Verisign is a monopoly. And it's not clear that a non-monopolistic situation would actually work all that well -- at least, it certainly doesn't work well for reliability, since everyone but Verisign has dropped out (was there ever any other serious CAs?)
Some things the private sector is really horrible at providing, like health care and transportation infrastructure. I think certificates might be one of them.
Setting up a non-profit to issue certs sounds like a nice idea, but isn't a realistic option when one must
spend lots of money to audit ones practices to assure the public. The commercial CAs are even having
troubles making money...
Hmmm... kind of makes me wish the government would take this over. Well, it makes me wish the government had taken it over -- if they did so now they'd no doubt put backdoors in.
Still, the identifying-business seems like something government is reasonably good at doing. It's a naturally bureaucratic process, and private companies don't seem to be all that much better than governments at such things (except they are much more expensive).
.NET and Java are not even in the same class. One is a language. The other is a marketing buzzword that
covers a variety of technologies. Be more precise. What part of.NET are you talking about?
The other scripting languages do something Java does not do well -- they integrate with compiled C modules and libraries. If you want speed in those languages, you write critical inner loops in C. It's not incredibly easy, but with OSS someone else will often do it, and that speed-critical piece of code will be written in reusable fashion.
AFAIK, this is simply not possible with Java. You can potential create some sort of network service written in a fast language, and access that through Java (as with a COM/CORBA object), but that doesn't offer the level of integration and speed that the other scripting languages have with their more modest integration.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it really wouldn't make a difference -- but I don't really think that these high-profile executives are really all that hard-skinned. They revel in the attention. Confronting such a public figure with your distaste for them is an important political statement. And they don't deserve to feel good about themselves.
And there's something comforting -- as in a passion play -- when a group of people can agree and express their common opinion of who is good and who is bad.
The RIAA defrauds and coerces artists through their cartel into giving up their copyrights. If anyone is stealing copyrights, it's the RIAA. It most certainly isn't the the P2P networks.
Music needs its own set of portals, ala /. -- and ones that aren't comemrcially aligned. Something might already exists... if someone has a pointer, that'd be cool.
The downloaders may not be giving compensation that they might otherwise have given. But they aren't taking anything from the artists. And even if they are freeloaders, they aren't taking anything from anyone else either. The RIAA is taking money from consumers, and they don't even have the decency to give decent compensation to the people who make it possible.
Unfortunately none of the big web-hosting review sites have anything about VPS -- just shared hosts and colos. I found it hard to find information.
Anyway, for the same price at superb.net you do get root and access to install whatever the heck you want. I bet the $150 deal at Verio is more like what you want. But as I look at it, it doesn't actually say anything about root. Most of the other places are pretty explicit about that.
If you don't get root, it's not a very big step above a shared host. I guess you can do long-running processes.
A few people seem curious about this. I did a little research several months ago. Here's the places that looked decent:
http://www.asp-linux.com/en/services/hosting/power server.shtml
$65/mo -- a little sparse on information. I don't understand how you can have a VPS with limited POP boxes or no SSL. Maybe they just don't install it for you...?
http://www.vitalserver.com/prices/
$75/mo -- The website is a little sparse.
http://services.superb.net/sps/
$80/mo -- I've heard of them. Look competent. $90 when you pay quarterly, $80 only if you pay yearly.
http://www.lightspeedhost.com/vps/detailed.html
$80/mo -- same limitations as asp-linux...?
http://www.1000island.net/virtual.htm
$100/mo -- Looks half-assed. They have a phone number listed without an area code...
http://www.datapipe.com/privateserver.htm
$150/mo -- 10 IP address, reasonably cheap to get more.
http://home.verio.com/products/hosting/web/vps/vps standard.cfm
$150/mo -- FreeBSD (all others are Linux). Don't mention IP addresses -- only one?
But it's obviously not a normal Linux system, since it's hosting multiple fully virtual systems on the same computer.
It seems like this is the same kind of thing this person is talking about...? Is this more general in some way? What exactly is my host using anyway?
It is quite true that charity cannot replace business. But public works can replace business. That would be really cool.
Even cashiers use a computer extensively -- only we forget that's what the cash register is. And I have never seen a cash register with a mouse (though some -- not many -- have touch screens).
Tog is considering a novice user populace, one who hasn't become accustomed to their tools. But that's not a realistic test -- everyone who uses the computer much will become accustomed to their tools. If they don't use the computer much, then they don't even matter that much, because there isn't that much total time to be saved on the interface.
You want me to take a bunch of people who know Emacs and test their time doing some editing task against their time using a mouse-based editor? I don't need to bother with the experiment to tell you those people will be way, way faster in Emacs. And even if I did the experiment, it wouldn't mean anything, except maybe that people can become much faster at actions with experience.
If I was to take those people and force them to use particular tools for at least three months (if not more) for real tasks, and then test them, then I could say something about the efficiency of the interfaces. Otherwise the experiment means nothing to the average slashdotter who uses their tools extensively. In fact, it says little to the average person who uses a computer extensively -- which is a really large population.
Any experiment that doesn't take account of a human's ability to learn and fully assimilate seemingly nonintuitive actions is flawed. If you are creating an interface for a fire alarm, where a person might use it a few times in their lifetime, then the kinds of experiments Tog is using are appropriate. That ain't how computers are used.
This is simply silly -- deciding what you want to do, and how you need to do it, is a constant for any interface that is at all natural.
Some say that a keyboard interface is not as natural as a mouse interface. But that's silly too -- as though there something natural about moving the mouse around and hitting menus. The visual interface tends to be more self-documenting. But for actions that are taken on a regular basis this isn't important -- actions like closing a window, opening a URL, searching for a string, copy, paste... yada yada yada, there are hundreds of these that we can easily keep in our heads if we use the computer often enough -- which is at least true for everyone here at slashdot, if not for every Mac user.
I think the interface that is best for the novice user is no longer being fair to the average computer user of today, who is not a novice (or at least does not want to be), and who uses their computer a great deal more. It's difficult for people to move from novice to experienced when they aren't naturally inclined to do so -- however, they would benefit from that transition, and they need that more than they need easy interfaces.
The keyboard interface that is analagous to the mouse interface might be what you get with M-x in Emacs, or tab completion on the command line. It's vaguely self-documenting, and not necessarily faster than a mouse-based interface. These are interfaces best served to deal with a very large array of options with which the user is not particularly familiar.
However, I find the keyboard vastly more reliable and general an interface than the mouse for any medium that is not strictly visual -- which is most of what I (and most people) use the computer for. By not visual, that would include language or symbol based... which can be visual too, but I can't think of the right word to distinguish them.
Of course, better memory management would be better. But Galeon does what it can to make the instabilities less painful.
It is somewhat interesting, because the kernel is the foundation for everything else. Well, libc is nearly as basic. So what happens at that low level effects everything, whether you run KDE or Gnome or just the command line.
That's what I get for reading at threshold 2.
Pretty much all history tells us there is: IBM tried something, and it failed.
MS might try and succede. It might try and fail. When it tries and fails, people will say, "hey, that's just like IBM". And MS will decline. But really, failure is failure. Closed protocols are not failure. Being a giant company is not failure. Being a giant company in decline is failure. Presenting closed protocols that no one uses is failure.
When that happens, MS will have failed. Not because it's just like IBM, but just because that stuff happens. When you lose something, you always find it in the last place you look. Failure precedes decline. These aren't grand patterns, they just are.
Can someone tell me what he's talking about? The post he links to doesn't seem to be related.
If you look at what was happening in Nicaragua after the revolution, it was very impressive. Within a year they had increased literacy from something like 50% to 88% (admittedly, under a modest definition of literacy). They were providing health care, they were rebuilding a nation that had been thoroughly looted... they were building up their country faster than any of the "success stories" of today. They were doing so with justice -- they had armed their entire populace, and yet there was no rebellion: a very concrete measure of the satisfaction of citizens.
What did they get for it? The US pumped a ton of money to support the former death squads of the previous dictatorship, whose primary method of recruitment was kidnapping, and whose primary targets were civilians and hospitals. Eventually they tore the nation down.
Cuba, for all its flaws, has truly tried hard to do good for its citizens. And when you compare Cuba to other Carribean countries, it really hasn't done badly, because on the whole the Carribean nations are hellholes -- even the tourism-based nations tend to be incredibly poor outside of the tourist enclaves. Cuba provides good healthcare and has very high literacy. People aren't starving. And again, they were building up from an abismal dictatorship. They've remained in stasis for some time, but if they hadn't been constantly under attack maybe they'd have had a better chance of success.
And why has the United States hated Cuba so much? It's not the social policies -- there are far, far worse nations the US has supported. It's because Cuba offered an example of a country going it alone, and to a degree succeding. Even now, despite all that's happened, many people in Latin America look up to Cuba as a model of true independance.
Personally, I think a lot of what has happened in Yugoslavia has come from the same motivation -- unlike the other Eastern European countries, Yugoslavia had real potential to continue real independance after the fall of the USSR. While the US and European countries were much more subtle about it, many of the events there have been very suspicious. And when the dust settled, it's interesting that the Bosnian currency and national bank is directly controlled by Western European nations and the US.
As I look to current globalization, it's not trade or homogeneity that bothers me -- it's a system of rules that is created purely by the international elite, enforced by that elite, and thus is for the benefit of that elite. They want there to be only one economic game around -- one economy for the whole world, no diversity, no attempt for independance. I don't think they'll ever let a nation build itself up. They'll let a nation sell itself off, so they can come in and build it up (and then own it)... but they have to have their cut, whether it is deserved or not.
What education are you talking about? I really don't understand what sort of education would address these issues.
So why doesn't Linux just copy BSD?
The code here seems rather incidental, it's the design that is more important. But why not copy a good design? Or do one (or both) of the contending VMs do so?
Ultimately, the government is a political system, where private companies are commercial systems. I think political systems can be superior in some circumstances -- particularly where a there's a central authority, universal accessibility, and long-term reliability (i.e., not reliant on economic factors). Or, at least, where there's a need for all those things.
We already mostly have this, because Verisign is a monopoly. And it's not clear that a non-monopolistic situation would actually work all that well -- at least, it certainly doesn't work well for reliability, since everyone but Verisign has dropped out (was there ever any other serious CAs?)
Some things the private sector is really horrible at providing, like health care and transportation infrastructure. I think certificates might be one of them.
Still, the identifying-business seems like something government is reasonably good at doing. It's a naturally bureaucratic process, and private companies don't seem to be all that much better than governments at such things (except they are much more expensive).
AFAIK, this is simply not possible with Java. You can potential create some sort of network service written in a fast language, and access that through Java (as with a COM/CORBA object), but that doesn't offer the level of integration and speed that the other scripting languages have with their more modest integration.