I don't get it; are they planning to make it print remotely triggered by the broadcaster? if so, may their printers burn and the ink rot. if not (as I would assume), then what are these fears of sollicitation all about?
shows that people are still looking for free -- even if they have to view ads and are tracked.
no, it shows that most of the people who have seen a useful web without ads, and who don't want to be tracked, also know how to run junkbuster or turn off cookies or remove the cookie file once a day or/etc/hosts the big adservers away. now if we could get an URL blacklist into Mozilla, instead of the lame-assed IMG filter (hello Mozpeople, adservers use IFRAMEs and ILAYERs these days), *and* ideally some kind of user-controlled flexible HTML rewriting...
The difference is that Outlook is NOT TELLING its user that it's about to run a script. To the user the actions (double clicking) are *exactly teh same* that the does countless times every day to open a harmless excel spreadsheet or whatever. With Linux and perl scripts, mailers are so little integrated that you have to save a program and then run it from the prompt, to run a script, and users are so used to the idea that you don't run unknown programs lightly, that it doesn't bother them us at all. Giving users a one-click way to run untrusted code is extremely bad UI design, whichever way you want to look at it, and it's solely MS's fault.
Microsoft made all it could to blur the distinction between opening a document (which is SAFE, and you don't need to trust anyone) and running CODE (which can royally mess up your system). THAT, in my not so very humble opinion, is why MS are to blame with the ILOVEYOU virus, and with all the Word macro viruses that came before. Any company with a tech clue *and* the willingness to let the tech clue stand before short-term marketing pushes would never have made it so easy to run untrusted crap. All the while Sun tried to make code safe in a safe sandboxed way (read, Java), but it was so heavy that people came up with these lighter 'scripting' solutions.... and completely forgot about implementing security.
I saw SCO's booth at the Linux Expo in Madrid last week, and asked how they relate to Linux. Their answer was "we sell software for it, and we'll sell more of it". Next thing they were giving me a demo copy of OpenServer and another of UnixWare, and practically begging me to install them and test them out!! so I wouldn't count on SCO actively supporting Linux very much so far. not that they have an obligation either...
They feel the heat in the market place, they see their customers switching over to Linux or BSD, so they've realized they need to 1) take Linux seriously, and 2) worry about making money with it. But they still haven't understood that "you don't want to compete with a successful open source project unless you're MUCH better". and SCO and Unixware do have some strong points over Linux, but they're not MUCH better, certainly not in a way that Linux can't thoroughly catch up in a matter of, say, six months. SGI saw it and did the right thing: keep improving IRIX, but for the long term see Linux as its replacement. IBM saw it and did the right thing: dump their proprietary webserver and switch to Apache. I believe SCO will end up having to do the same with their OSs, and the longer it takes them, the more money they'll waste in the process.
as a complete outsider to this story (I don't think iopeners are even available in Europe), I find nothing much to fault with the company's stance, *except* for the retroactive contracts. If *I* was bitten with one of these, I'd tell my bank not to pay. now, leaving that aside, good luck to Netpliance with their stuff, they sound like they more or less "get it".
IANAL either, but from what I've heard things aren't so dire as you explain. in particular, no individual or company can place restrictions on your ability to *implement an idea*, otherwise than by patenting it, or having *you* accept these restrictions. if someone else gave the information to you (and there are no patents), you are legally FREE to use it. so the above posts aren't "illegal"; the act of posting them may be (but that's a risk the poster is taking), but the posts themselves are not.
it may be morally ambiguous, but my opinion is that business models that depend on hiding information from the user, or on giving the user a package with limited rights on what s/he may do with it, are not healthy for the company, and even less for society as a whole. so I would support laws going in the opposite direction: that things are sold, and that any company trying to make money from "side channels" does so at their own risk, and that users are perfectly allowed to sidestep said channels.
creating laws to keep the French language pure won't kill French; it'll just widen (even more) the gap between spoken and formal, written, "pure" French. if the French-speaking people actually followed these laws, they'd end up like the Arabs, with a completely different spoken and written language. but I doubt they will anyway; written French will continue to lag 50 years behind the spoken variety, but I don't think that the laws and regulations will ultimately manage to prevent its evolution.
if kids in the past had used these guns for hunting, and killed all kinds of animals yet they were not raving lunatics, then why are the kids today turning into these evil beasts because of video games?
if people stopped trying to put *blame* around for a second, and turned to teh much more interesting tasks of looking at the actual chains of causes and effects that reinforce each other in society... and if we (the/.-ians) stopped being so defensive about these games just because most of us play them, we might even begin to accept that there *is* something of a relationship between games that train you in a simulation to kill humans indiscriminately, and violence in society. that doesn't mean that games produce violent kids; rather, that in a relatively violent society there's nothing surprising in the fact that violence is featured prominently in movies, tv, games, songs, and everywhere in popular culture. and that if a society were to become less violent, the representation of violence for entertainment would probably go down too.
as for hunting and guns, yes, I totally agree that teaching a kid to hunt will give him responsability. the point is that hunting is controlled violence within rigid bounds of acceptability, and has (somewhat of) a redeeming reason too (namely, collecting food). it may be violent, but it is not mindlessly violent. I don't think it's even comparable to the kind of violence that's featured in movies and video games.
There is no such thing as 'legit spam'. Mass e-mail should *always* be opt-in, with no exception. I consider even RedHat's famous IPO-mail back then to be spam; the proper way to do it would have been with a webpage.
there has to be a first to everything, and here's my first whine about moderation. I go through the list of new 5.6 features, giving my opinion on each of them, and it gets moderated "redundant"? whatever.
unicode support: it's a good thing, and not intrusive: it's off unless I "use utf8".
lvalue subs: not really important; I can see it being used in methods, i.e allowing $object->method = $value, rather than the usual $object->method("value")
improved threading, and win32 fork emulation. I dislike both threads and win32, so no comment. If peopel find it useful, it's good, I just hope it doesn't bloat perl too much when i'm not using it.
improved perl compiler: neat, I wish it got to the point where it's usable in practice, though. bytecode production and loading seems to be 'almost there'; I'm looking forward to them.
auto-vivification of filehandles: great. finally say goodbye to the Symbol::gensym kludge, for those cases where IO::* is just too heavy.
weak references: neat idea, annoying implementation. I mean, it needs support in the core, so why not just make it part of core and have a 'weaken' func, instead of needing a special module?
delete/exists on arrays: neat.
lexical warnings: cool.
'our': I still think 'use vars' was perfectly good enough, and this is just added confusion.
v1.3.6 strings: kind of worthless.
large (>2GB) file support: good feature.
improvements in 'use fields', typed object refs and pseudo-hashes: the idea is to make objects look like hashes (with fields in $obj->{keys}), but be actually implemented as (faster) arrays, with compile-time checking of what field names actually exist. I'll be using this.
cool. I've been thinking for a while that one of the things that mkae programs unnecessarily slow are ordering problems in libraries, symbol resolution and other dl* magic. if this 'fur' program makes that faster, we'll have to say thanks SCO.
I'd cringe if my browser went to the same page when I open a new window. 99% of the times I open a new window to go somewhere else while leaving the other page open; I have netscape configured not to load anything initially, so I get a new *empty* window where I can type or paste an URL or go to a bookmark. if your "home portal" takes your precious time, turn the damn thing off! you can always click on "home" when you want to go there.
I'm working on a multi-lingual-capable system these days; it puts together static text from various templates (in various files) with script-generated sections, and has meta-commands for "this bit in french" "this bit in english" for cases where you want to put everything into a single file (otehrwise you can just have one file for each langauge version). the driving ideas are:
total separation of content and code (to the extent that the content files don't even have conditionals, all they have is a way to give names to different bits and specify templating relationships)
dynamic "compilation" of pages into data structures, with cacheing of this intermediate form, and
the fundamental unit is a content page that calls code, not a code page that outputs content.
the whole thing is perl-based, on top of mod_perl and speaking directly to apache's perl API (i.e not using CGI.pm or Apache::Registry).
send me an e-mail if you're interested; it's in a very raw format now and not near release, but i'll probably be able to release it as open source. if not, well, at least we can talk about it:)
what am I doing answering to an old thread on/., as if anyone read those... anyway:) yeah, you get the idea. I don't criticize anyone individually; I think Jenni is to be admired for what she has done and for the strength it must have required of her, and for making the point that a life voluntarily with no privacy *is* possible and thinkable. and I respect the people who go to the site, because, well, who am I to criticize them, as if I didn't waste time too with other things that are quite worthless too. it's only in the larger cultural picture that I criticize Jennicam, in the same way that I pretty much despise most of what's on TV.
exactly. Elias Levy isn't arguing against open source, and certainly not proposing that closed source is more secure. he's just reminding us not to get *too* carried away, and stressing that actually reading code is a good thing to do. your reply just proves that you were expecting an "argument", i.e either for or against "us", the OSS guys. reality isn't black and white, and I thank Elias Levy for reminding us.
face it, Kill 'm All and Master of Puppets are amazing albums
I'm sick and tired of seeing "face it, {sweeping statement goes here}" in what is supposed to be rational discourse. "face it" means exactly "it's true because I say so and if you don't agree it's because you're lying to yourself". that is exactly what "face it" means. it doesn't even allow the possibility of an intelligent disagreement. in my book, anyone who uses "face it" has immediately lost the argument.
not that I know or care in this particular case if these 2 albums were amazing or not. it's about the way of saying it that I'm complaining.
huh? quit lying to ourselves? I don't need to lie to myself to say I'm not interested in Jennicam. I remember back in 97 or so when it became sort of known, and sure, I went and looked at the page, maybe 5 times across a couple of weeks. then I just forgot about it, because it's just not that interesting, really.
I respect Jenni as a (probably) intelligent human being who made something of her life and had an impact. But I DON'T respect Jennicam, nor the bigger picture that it stands for, which is to use other people's dull lives as entertainment. Not for moral reasons, she's not "selling herself" anymore than a TV actor is, anyway. My opinion of Jennicam is more or less the same as my opinion of soap operas on TV. Pure meaningless time-filling dumb entertainment. Which is fine as a guilty pleasure if you take it like that, but in terms of "how worthwhile it is for you", it's really very near the bottom of it all.
Anyway, when glazing over the works of philosophers such as Russell, Godel, Nietzsche, Descartes, etc - do you see them concocting rigid belief systems?
well, in the case of Descartes, yes, I do.
now Russell, that was a real smart, open-minded guy. Gödel wasn't really in the business of belief peddling, was he? Where I come from, he's known more as a logician than as a philosopher...
I see Kant's "categorical imperative" bandied about much whenever it comes to ethics and morals, but for all I can see it's just another argument of authority. I respect Kant's system, but I'm not going to base my life and thinking on it, by any stretch of the imagination. So the "categorical imperative", despite its own name, is neither categorical nor imperative to me, and shouldn't be to you either, unless you've specifically gone and studied Kantian philosophy and been utterly convinced that that is "truth" to you. For the rest of us, sometimes we'll do as if we followed it, because it actually does make sense in a lot of cases, but it'll be because we coincide at that point, not because of accepting it as a principle.
The name of Kant tends to command a lot of respect from people; people who would never refer to christian morals as an authority without at least giving a second of thought that not everyone is a Christian, will happily refer to the "categorical imperative" as if it were, well, truly categorical and imperative and universally applicable to everyone whatever their beliefs.
oh, a java client. how long util someone decompiles it, figures out what to send, and hacks an open source client to join their network? then again, why bother. as people have said, it's just another stupid chat network, who wants a chat network with ads when there are tons of IRC networks without? talkcity who?
people who download executables and run them without a thought about the possible consequences and about the respectability of the place they're getting them from, deserve everything they get and more. if wrapster, or whatever it's called, will cause a mass infection, I won't be sorry for anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get it; are they planning to make it print remotely triggered by the broadcaster? if so, may their printers burn and the ink rot. if not (as I would assume), then what are these fears of sollicitation all about?
The difference is that Outlook is NOT TELLING its user that it's about to run a script. To the user the actions (double clicking) are *exactly teh same* that the does countless times every day to open a harmless excel spreadsheet or whatever. With Linux and perl scripts, mailers are so little integrated that you have to save a program and then run it from the prompt, to run a script, and users are so used to the idea that you don't run unknown programs lightly, that it doesn't bother them us at all. Giving users a one-click way to run untrusted code is extremely bad UI design, whichever way you want to look at it, and it's solely MS's fault.
Microsoft made all it could to blur the distinction between opening a document (which is SAFE, and you don't need to trust anyone) and running CODE (which can royally mess up your system). THAT, in my not so very humble opinion, is why MS are to blame with the ILOVEYOU virus, and with all the Word macro viruses that came before. Any company with a tech clue *and* the willingness to let the tech clue stand before short-term marketing pushes would never have made it so easy to run untrusted crap. All the while Sun tried to make code safe in a safe sandboxed way (read, Java), but it was so heavy that people came up with these lighter 'scripting' solutions.... and completely forgot about implementing security.
I saw SCO's booth at the Linux Expo in Madrid last week, and asked how they relate to Linux. Their answer was "we sell software for it, and we'll sell more of it". Next thing they were giving me a demo copy of OpenServer and another of UnixWare, and practically begging me to install them and test them out!! so I wouldn't count on SCO actively supporting Linux very much so far. not that they have an obligation either...
They feel the heat in the market place, they see their customers switching over to Linux or BSD, so they've realized they need to 1) take Linux seriously, and 2) worry about making money with it. But they still haven't understood that "you don't want to compete with a successful open source project unless you're MUCH better". and SCO and Unixware do have some strong points over Linux, but they're not MUCH better, certainly not in a way that Linux can't thoroughly catch up in a matter of, say, six months. SGI saw it and did the right thing: keep improving IRIX, but for the long term see Linux as its replacement. IBM saw it and did the right thing: dump their proprietary webserver and switch to Apache. I believe SCO will end up having to do the same with their OSs, and the longer it takes them, the more money they'll waste in the process.
as a complete outsider to this story (I don't think iopeners are even available in Europe), I find nothing much to fault with the company's stance, *except* for the retroactive contracts. If *I* was bitten with one of these, I'd tell my bank not to pay. now, leaving that aside, good luck to Netpliance with their stuff, they sound like they more or less "get it".
again, IANAL.
it may be morally ambiguous, but my opinion is that business models that depend on hiding information from the user, or on giving the user a package with limited rights on what s/he may do with it, are not healthy for the company, and even less for society as a whole. so I would support laws going in the opposite direction: that things are sold, and that any company trying to make money from "side channels" does so at their own risk, and that users are perfectly allowed to sidestep said channels.
creating laws to keep the French language pure won't kill French; it'll just widen (even more) the gap between spoken and formal, written, "pure" French. if the French-speaking people actually followed these laws, they'd end up like the Arabs, with a completely different spoken and written language. but I doubt they will anyway; written French will continue to lag 50 years behind the spoken variety, but I don't think that the laws and regulations will ultimately manage to prevent its evolution.
as for hunting and guns, yes, I totally agree that teaching a kid to hunt will give him responsability. the point is that hunting is controlled violence within rigid bounds of acceptability, and has (somewhat of) a redeeming reason too (namely, collecting food). it may be violent, but it is not mindlessly violent. I don't think it's even comparable to the kind of violence that's featured in movies and video games.
There is no such thing as 'legit spam'. Mass e-mail should *always* be opt-in, with no exception. I consider even RedHat's famous IPO-mail back then to be spam; the proper way to do it would have been with a webpage.
there has to be a first to everything, and here's my first whine about moderation. I go through the list of new 5.6 features, giving my opinion on each of them, and it gets moderated "redundant"? whatever.
cool. I've been thinking for a while that one of the things that mkae programs unnecessarily slow are ordering problems in libraries, symbol resolution and other dl* magic. if this 'fur' program makes that faster, we'll have to say thanks SCO.
I'd cringe if my browser went to the same page when I open a new window. 99% of the times I open a new window to go somewhere else while leaving the other page open; I have netscape configured not to load anything initially, so I get a new *empty* window where I can type or paste an URL or go to a bookmark. if your "home portal" takes your precious time, turn the damn thing off! you can always click on "home" when you want to go there.
- total separation of content and code (to the extent that the content files don't even have conditionals, all they have is a way to give names to different bits and specify templating relationships)
- dynamic "compilation" of pages into data structures, with cacheing of this intermediate form, and
- the fundamental unit is a content page that calls code, not a code page that outputs content.
the whole thing is perl-based, on top of mod_perl and speaking directly to apache's perl API (i.e not using CGI.pm or Apache::Registry).send me an e-mail if you're interested; it's in a very raw format now and not near release, but i'll probably be able to release it as open source. if not, well, at least we can talk about it :)
what am I doing answering to an old thread on /., as if anyone read those... anyway :) yeah, you get the idea. I don't criticize anyone individually; I think Jenni is to be admired for what she has done and for the strength it must have required of her, and for making the point that a life voluntarily with no privacy *is* possible and thinkable. and I respect the people who go to the site, because, well, who am I to criticize them, as if I didn't waste time too with other things that are quite worthless too. it's only in the larger cultural picture that I criticize Jennicam, in the same way that I pretty much despise most of what's on TV.
exactly. Elias Levy isn't arguing against open source, and certainly not proposing that closed source is more secure. he's just reminding us not to get *too* carried away, and stressing that actually reading code is a good thing to do. your reply just proves that you were expecting an "argument", i.e either for or against "us", the OSS guys. reality isn't black and white, and I thank Elias Levy for reminding us.
not that I know or care in this particular case if these 2 albums were amazing or not. it's about the way of saying it that I'm complaining.
I respect Jenni as a (probably) intelligent human being who made something of her life and had an impact. But I DON'T respect Jennicam, nor the bigger picture that it stands for, which is to use other people's dull lives as entertainment. Not for moral reasons, she's not "selling herself" anymore than a TV actor is, anyway. My opinion of Jennicam is more or less the same as my opinion of soap operas on TV. Pure meaningless time-filling dumb entertainment. Which is fine as a guilty pleasure if you take it like that, but in terms of "how worthwhile it is for you", it's really very near the bottom of it all.
now Russell, that was a real smart, open-minded guy. Gödel wasn't really in the business of belief peddling, was he? Where I come from, he's known more as a logician than as a philosopher...
The name of Kant tends to command a lot of respect from people; people who would never refer to christian morals as an authority without at least giving a second of thought that not everyone is a Christian, will happily refer to the "categorical imperative" as if it were, well, truly categorical and imperative and universally applicable to everyone whatever their beliefs.
oh, a java client. how long util someone decompiles it, figures out what to send, and hacks an open source client to join their network? then again, why bother. as people have said, it's just another stupid chat network, who wants a chat network with ads when there are tons of IRC networks without? talkcity who?
people who download executables and run them without a thought about the possible consequences and about the respectability of the place they're getting them from, deserve everything they get and more. if wrapster, or whatever it's called, will cause a mass infection, I won't be sorry for anyone.