I doubt that very much. Let's put it this way: at a relative's house, I tried to watch a movie from their cable subscription, provided by Time Warner. It skipped, whole scenes were ruined, and I even missed key details. I thought that perhaps I could use the "on demand" service to watch the movie a second time, without skipping -- and the movie was not even available on demand. I tried a different on demand movie, and kept getting an error message, "This movie is not available right now, we apologize for the inconvenience."
The "maturity not freedom or quality" argument really does not hold water. Torrents do not suffer from deliberate sabotage (region encoding, DRM, etc.), most torrent sites will give you an indication about the likelihood that you can get the torrent (seeder/leecher count), and once the torrent is downloaded, you can watch the movie on your schedule. The "licensed" offerings really do not compete, and the only reason younger people are flocking to torrents more than older people is that the younger people are more comfortable with computers.
"Scientists really have to do a better job at communicating clearly with less jargon,"
This is not as simple as you make it seem; many scientific results have subtle but important facets that require highly specific language (i.e. jargon) to properly clarify. It is the difference between humans being descendants of chimpanzees and humans sharing a common ancestor with chimpanzees -- a very common point of confusion that stems from attempts to describe the theory of evolution in overly simple terms. When scientific results are described in vague-but-easy-to-understand terms, it puts ammunition in the hands of people who, for whatever reason, wish to attack science.
"You really have to catch people in contradictions in a public venue with an argument that is simple to understand and you'd look like an idiot for not accepting."
What is needed is a more educated populace, that can better understand the precise language of scientific results and the implications of those results. Then people who did not accept scientific results really would look like idiots, and they would stand out as idiots.
My guess is that the companies will try to charge their customers more for "location based services," and also charging the companies that use location data to actually provide those "services."
How about catching the bad guys without infringing on the rights of everyone else? You know, that is how things are supposed to be done in the United States of America, where our civil liberties were written into the constitution early in our history.
Except that by obtaining the software through the apps store, they are agreeing to a license that stipulates that they can only use the software on a limited number of approved devices. That screams "GPL violation," although my understanding of the law might not be complete enough to make that assertion; at the very least, it is completely opposed to the spirit of the GPL.
It is in violation because the license for the software changes when it is obtained through the apps store. The GPL applies to the distribution of the software in both binary and source form -- you cannot distribute the binary under a proprietary license, even if you are making the source available under a libre license.
Except that the users do not have the freedom to exercise their rights under the GPL, which include being able to redistribute modified versions of the software without limits or royalty payments. For a user of this application to modify it and redistribute the modified version to an unlimited number of persons, they would have to pay the developer fee that Apple demands, which at the very least is not in keeping with the spirit of the GPL, and may very well be a violation in and of itself.
Apple's developer agreement is in direction opposition to the GPL, so why shouldn't the FSF, which works to spread libre software, use this as a pretext for discussing the issue with Apple? Sure, Apple will probably ignore them, since Apple has absolutely no interest in the sort of user freedom the FSF is pushing, but at least they have a reason to contact Apple in this case.
If you RTFA, you will notice the FSF has contacted the person responsible for putting the offending application in the apps store.
I have also heard of people in rural areas who heat their homes by digging holes and using heat trapped in water a dozen or so feet below the soil; they sometimes do this without using pumps. There are farmers who create cheap biodiesel using plant material left over from the harvest. There are people who create biochar, and use the excess burning from that process as a source of energy (to cook with, or perhaps to drive some other chemical reaction). All of these things can be done on very low budgets.
It is true, though, that larger scale projects require more money, but that is not at all surprising. Really though, a lot of the work is done at universities on grant money, which is an entirely different world from businesses/community development.
That all sounds like advantages of libre software, which was my original point. It is not "no cost," but the costs do tend to be lower when the license is not designed to undermine you ability to use the software. It is hard to make a case for a proprietary licensing arrangement when there is libre licensed software that fits the same purpose as the proprietary software, which is precisely why Sun lost ground with Solaris.
Replace Windows on the server? Microsoft did not even make a serious entry into the server market for a decade after the beginning of GNU, and while Microsoft was still trying to figure out how to get their act together in the server market, GNU/Linux was making serious headway in replacing proprietary Unix. Where on earth did you get the idea that our goal was to replace Windows Server System?
The goal is not to replace any single operating system; it is to create a libre OS that people can use, share, modify, etc. Microsoft is criticized for attacking that effort, viciously at times, but guess what? So is Apple, so is SCO, and so was Sun when they were still making proprietary operating systems. If you think that the goal is to compete specifically with Windows, you are seriously uninformed.
This explains, of course, why RHEL is so popular in server rooms and why so many for Solaris shops switched over to RHEL, and why they paid so much for Red Hat support contracts.
As for innovation, that tends to come out of research labs, and I would not argue that one (especially since I am a PhD student).
"What was the goal of the Linux community--to replace Windows?"
No Mr. Joy, the goal of the Linux community was to create a kernel that would run GNU, and ultimately lead to a libre operating system that was suitable for day to day use. In fact, part of the reason Sun had such a hard time staying in business was competition from GNU/Linux in the server room, which displaced Solaris.
It seems that Red Hat is only going to support KVM in RHEL, regardless of what the Fedora community does. Really, that is not so uncommon -- Fedora has a lot of things RHEL does not have (look at the "spins").
Here is a scenario for you: you have some old server that is going to be decommissioned, but it is running some important software, and perhaps a different operating system from all of your other servers. On the one hand, you can go ahead and configure a new system...or with virtualization, you can simply take a snapshot of the hard disk image and run a VM on some other server (perhaps one that is underutilized).
In general, the point of virtualization in a server room is flexibility. VMs are easy to move around, you do not have to be tied to a single operating system (I hear the most common use of KVM is to run Exchange on system with a Linux hyperviser) on a single physical machine, which is particularly useful for sharing hardware resources when you have to deal with software that only runs on a specific OS. VMs also make it easy to checkpoint a system; KVM has "copy on write" disk images, for example, which track changes from a base image, which could be a COW image itself.
IBM did a lot of research on virtualization use, and I believe they had discovered uses for using VMs within VMs up to four layers deep (I am not really sure what they were doing).
Really though, it is possible to connect to existing P2P networks through NAT without any extra configuration. Why should a P2P social network suddenly make the exist solutions to the problem infeasible or more difficult to support?
Then you do not add them to your "friends" list. I see P2P social networking being driven by cryptography, so that your data is replicated across the network but only the people you approve as friends are able to decrypt it. Thus, for Facebook or Google to undermine your privacy, you would have to explicitly allow them to do so -- it would be forced out into the open. Further, there would be few incentives for users to allow a company like Facebook to access their data, since the social networking aspect is provided to them regardless.
Of course, Facebook could try to insert itself in the network by allowing people using a P2P social network to add Facebook users to their friends list, and thus undermine privacy in that manner. That would have an interesting effect, though, as it would force Facebook to be interoperable with another system, something which they have still refused to do. This would be a baby step forward, and would not do much to solve the privacy issues associated with Facebook, but at least it would not be a backward step.
There are a few ways P2P would solve the problem. The first that comes to mind is that it would reduce the incentive to undermine privacy, since the social network would not be funded by the sale of personal data (or data derived from personal data). It would also increase the cost of undermining privacy, since people would not just be throwing their data at a single centralized datacenter.
As for distributing the data across the network, it is very easy to solve that problem cryptographically. You encrypt your data, and the decryption key is distributed as part of the "friending" process. In theory, if your friends are out to get you and want your privacy to be undermined, they could distribute the key further, but this is not much different than the current situation, where they could just copy your data from a website and hand it out to people.
The problem is that social networking websites make their money by undermining user privacy; there is simply no incentive to actually listen to the users' complaints about privacy, and for a company that must answer to its investors, there is actually a disincentive to listen to the users. Users want privacy and social networking and social networking websites, and they do not want to pay for those websites -- it is just not possible to meet all of those demands at the same time. Privacy is the easiest thing to drop from the list of user demands you actually meet, since it is not the first thing most people will notice.
"Companies aren't going to write open software to control the $750K spectrometer they just sold you"
Then labs should not be buying their equipment from those companies.
"to be perfectly honest, I don't think I'd use software off of Sourceforge to control an investment of that type, anyway."
You do realize that a company could release code to its customers with Sourceforge being involved, right? It used to be considered a standard thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it is time to block these CDN "services?"
"a) How do they decide what is copyrighted? If *I* were to write a game/song/whatever and it got pirated I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even notice."
Welcome to the brave new world: individual creativity is ignored, because the major corporations are in control and do not care about individuals.
I doubt that very much. Let's put it this way: at a relative's house, I tried to watch a movie from their cable subscription, provided by Time Warner. It skipped, whole scenes were ruined, and I even missed key details. I thought that perhaps I could use the "on demand" service to watch the movie a second time, without skipping -- and the movie was not even available on demand. I tried a different on demand movie, and kept getting an error message, "This movie is not available right now, we apologize for the inconvenience."
The "maturity not freedom or quality" argument really does not hold water. Torrents do not suffer from deliberate sabotage (region encoding, DRM, etc.), most torrent sites will give you an indication about the likelihood that you can get the torrent (seeder/leecher count), and once the torrent is downloaded, you can watch the movie on your schedule. The "licensed" offerings really do not compete, and the only reason younger people are flocking to torrents more than older people is that the younger people are more comfortable with computers.
"Scientists really have to do a better job at communicating clearly with less jargon,"
This is not as simple as you make it seem; many scientific results have subtle but important facets that require highly specific language (i.e. jargon) to properly clarify. It is the difference between humans being descendants of chimpanzees and humans sharing a common ancestor with chimpanzees -- a very common point of confusion that stems from attempts to describe the theory of evolution in overly simple terms. When scientific results are described in vague-but-easy-to-understand terms, it puts ammunition in the hands of people who, for whatever reason, wish to attack science.
"You really have to catch people in contradictions in a public venue with an argument that is simple to understand and you'd look like an idiot for not accepting."
What is needed is a more educated populace, that can better understand the precise language of scientific results and the implications of those results. Then people who did not accept scientific results really would look like idiots, and they would stand out as idiots.
I think the phone companies will try to charge you for this. That would be more in keeping with their other behavior.
My guess is that the companies will try to charge their customers more for "location based services," and also charging the companies that use location data to actually provide those "services."
How about catching the bad guys without infringing on the rights of everyone else? You know, that is how things are supposed to be done in the United States of America, where our civil liberties were written into the constitution early in our history.
Except that by obtaining the software through the apps store, they are agreeing to a license that stipulates that they can only use the software on a limited number of approved devices. That screams "GPL violation," although my understanding of the law might not be complete enough to make that assertion; at the very least, it is completely opposed to the spirit of the GPL.
It is in violation because the license for the software changes when it is obtained through the apps store. The GPL applies to the distribution of the software in both binary and source form -- you cannot distribute the binary under a proprietary license, even if you are making the source available under a libre license.
Except that the users do not have the freedom to exercise their rights under the GPL, which include being able to redistribute modified versions of the software without limits or royalty payments. For a user of this application to modify it and redistribute the modified version to an unlimited number of persons, they would have to pay the developer fee that Apple demands, which at the very least is not in keeping with the spirit of the GPL, and may very well be a violation in and of itself.
Apple's developer agreement is in direction opposition to the GPL, so why shouldn't the FSF, which works to spread libre software, use this as a pretext for discussing the issue with Apple? Sure, Apple will probably ignore them, since Apple has absolutely no interest in the sort of user freedom the FSF is pushing, but at least they have a reason to contact Apple in this case.
If you RTFA, you will notice the FSF has contacted the person responsible for putting the offending application in the apps store.
Experiments with green technology do not have to cost millions of dollars:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/kamwamba-windmill/
I have also heard of people in rural areas who heat their homes by digging holes and using heat trapped in water a dozen or so feet below the soil; they sometimes do this without using pumps. There are farmers who create cheap biodiesel using plant material left over from the harvest. There are people who create biochar, and use the excess burning from that process as a source of energy (to cook with, or perhaps to drive some other chemical reaction). All of these things can be done on very low budgets.
It is true, though, that larger scale projects require more money, but that is not at all surprising. Really though, a lot of the work is done at universities on grant money, which is an entirely different world from businesses/community development.
That all sounds like advantages of libre software, which was my original point. It is not "no cost," but the costs do tend to be lower when the license is not designed to undermine you ability to use the software. It is hard to make a case for a proprietary licensing arrangement when there is libre licensed software that fits the same purpose as the proprietary software, which is precisely why Sun lost ground with Solaris.
Replace Windows on the server? Microsoft did not even make a serious entry into the server market for a decade after the beginning of GNU, and while Microsoft was still trying to figure out how to get their act together in the server market, GNU/Linux was making serious headway in replacing proprietary Unix. Where on earth did you get the idea that our goal was to replace Windows Server System?
The goal is not to replace any single operating system; it is to create a libre OS that people can use, share, modify, etc. Microsoft is criticized for attacking that effort, viciously at times, but guess what? So is Apple, so is SCO, and so was Sun when they were still making proprietary operating systems. If you think that the goal is to compete specifically with Windows, you are seriously uninformed.
This explains, of course, why RHEL is so popular in server rooms and why so many for Solaris shops switched over to RHEL, and why they paid so much for Red Hat support contracts.
As for innovation, that tends to come out of research labs, and I would not argue that one (especially since I am a PhD student).
"What was the goal of the Linux community--to replace Windows?"
No Mr. Joy, the goal of the Linux community was to create a kernel that would run GNU, and ultimately lead to a libre operating system that was suitable for day to day use. In fact, part of the reason Sun had such a hard time staying in business was competition from GNU/Linux in the server room, which displaced Solaris.
It seems that Red Hat is only going to support KVM in RHEL, regardless of what the Fedora community does. Really, that is not so uncommon -- Fedora has a lot of things RHEL does not have (look at the "spins").
Here is a scenario for you: you have some old server that is going to be decommissioned, but it is running some important software, and perhaps a different operating system from all of your other servers. On the one hand, you can go ahead and configure a new system...or with virtualization, you can simply take a snapshot of the hard disk image and run a VM on some other server (perhaps one that is underutilized).
In general, the point of virtualization in a server room is flexibility. VMs are easy to move around, you do not have to be tied to a single operating system (I hear the most common use of KVM is to run Exchange on system with a Linux hyperviser) on a single physical machine, which is particularly useful for sharing hardware resources when you have to deal with software that only runs on a specific OS. VMs also make it easy to checkpoint a system; KVM has "copy on write" disk images, for example, which track changes from a base image, which could be a COW image itself.
IBM did a lot of research on virtualization use, and I believe they had discovered uses for using VMs within VMs up to four layers deep (I am not really sure what they were doing).
Really though, it is possible to connect to existing P2P networks through NAT without any extra configuration. Why should a P2P social network suddenly make the exist solutions to the problem infeasible or more difficult to support?
It is fairly trivial to connect to Gnutella through a NAT without any port forwarding -- so I do not see this being a significant problem.
Then you do not add them to your "friends" list. I see P2P social networking being driven by cryptography, so that your data is replicated across the network but only the people you approve as friends are able to decrypt it. Thus, for Facebook or Google to undermine your privacy, you would have to explicitly allow them to do so -- it would be forced out into the open. Further, there would be few incentives for users to allow a company like Facebook to access their data, since the social networking aspect is provided to them regardless.
Of course, Facebook could try to insert itself in the network by allowing people using a P2P social network to add Facebook users to their friends list, and thus undermine privacy in that manner. That would have an interesting effect, though, as it would force Facebook to be interoperable with another system, something which they have still refused to do. This would be a baby step forward, and would not do much to solve the privacy issues associated with Facebook, but at least it would not be a backward step.
There are a few ways P2P would solve the problem. The first that comes to mind is that it would reduce the incentive to undermine privacy, since the social network would not be funded by the sale of personal data (or data derived from personal data). It would also increase the cost of undermining privacy, since people would not just be throwing their data at a single centralized datacenter.
As for distributing the data across the network, it is very easy to solve that problem cryptographically. You encrypt your data, and the decryption key is distributed as part of the "friending" process. In theory, if your friends are out to get you and want your privacy to be undermined, they could distribute the key further, but this is not much different than the current situation, where they could just copy your data from a website and hand it out to people.
The problem is that social networking websites make their money by undermining user privacy; there is simply no incentive to actually listen to the users' complaints about privacy, and for a company that must answer to its investors, there is actually a disincentive to listen to the users. Users want privacy and social networking and social networking websites, and they do not want to pay for those websites -- it is just not possible to meet all of those demands at the same time. Privacy is the easiest thing to drop from the list of user demands you actually meet, since it is not the first thing most people will notice.
Just like right now, we have IT support hell, maintaining our parents' web browsers and operating systems.
Seriously, you think that there is something special about P2P that makes it particularly harder to maintain?
"Companies aren't going to write open software to control the $750K spectrometer they just sold you"
Then labs should not be buying their equipment from those companies.
"to be perfectly honest, I don't think I'd use software off of Sourceforge to control an investment of that type, anyway."
You do realize that a company could release code to its customers with Sourceforge being involved, right? It used to be considered a standard thing to do.