<sarcasm> That makes me feel more secure... I mean, now, I don't have to worry about whether I should clean up the logs or not. It's not an option. One less thing to worry about. </sarcasm>
Then again, the hardest thing about finding a needle in a haystack isn't sorting out the hay. You really have a tough time finding a needle in a bunch of other needles.. --er, log entries.
Right now, we have to lay the foundations of this discussion to rest so we can get right to the point and avoid arguing things we agree on. If there are more pertinent references available to support your opinion, please post the links.
Thank you for the historical reference. Now, I can begin to research what you would not or could not explain. I will post a reply, in an un-troll like tactic designed to give the readers some factual basis for my assertions lowering the barrier of research a bit, so that they can participate without being ignorant. (lesson two in how to argue in a public forum).
You wish to eliminate copyright.
I disagree. I do so with authority. If something I have said misled you, I humbly request that you provide the base for this false inference so that I may clarify my previous expression. You also imagine purpose and malice behind this false conclusion. If you ask specifically, I will assure you that I have no malice. The purpose is moot. I authoritatively deny that you have stated my intention.
I regret that I cannot continue to participate in this discussion if I am the only contributor. I expect that if you wish to continue this dialog, you will continue to contribute arguable detail in excess of your blithe flaming. I'm not here as free entertainment to the tired, obsolete, and socially inept. If it doesn't serve the general readership, it doesn't meet my criterion, and it is thus badly ended. If all you want is the last word, then I concede. I am afraid your mind is too old to be changed anyways.
What I would like to see, if you are up to it, is the full demonstration (geometric proof?) of how you arrived at the inference that I purposefully and maliciously wish to abolish copyright. That's three false conclusions to defend: the wish, the purpose, and the malice. I respect you for the wisdom you may have, or will come to have, even if you have bitten off more than you can chew this time. Because you are trying, you are wise.
What you can say is not a reflection of who you are.
Troll, this is not the first time I've had to teach someone *how* to argue, but unless you are retarded or careless I think it is the first time you were taught how to argue. BTW: What part of any person's education would be most relevant here? Hrm?
All flames aside --I know: it IS fun-- though: The fact that I have to ask "What in the hell are you talking about?", whereas you did not, proves that my argument is more effective than yours. Please read carefully: I need help understanding what you mean.
Now, I *think* you are suggesting that there is a proof that my argument is false based on French history, and then you suggest I am uneducated. I would like to know which idea of mine won't work, and a reference to the history that you allude to. I would also like to know what you mean by "uneducated" and "intelligent" so that I can satisfy the (thus poorly worded) criteria of your appreciation.
BTW: I have a BS in Political Theory and Comparative Politics, minored in Philosophy, so while I may not be able to meet *YOUR* expectations, you are a fool for expecting MORE education in these matters from people you do not know. You are the father of your own discontent! I can help you achieve more realistic expectations though, so revenons a nos moutons! (That's a french expression which means "let's get back to the business at hand." You can get the rest from Babelfish)
Property, as we know it, is a legal definition set down in our tradition by John Locke. It is confined in Locke's conception as things which can be found in the common, improved by individuals, and which also become scarce when they are used. Locke's example is apples growing on trees become a man's property when he "mixes his labour" with them in the process of collection. A collection of shiny apples is surely improved over scattered apples amongst bruised and wormeaten ones. When another person happens on the collected nice apples, it would be wrong to deny the first man the benefit of his "labour" by taking apples from his pile. (maybe I remember this totally wrong.. correct me if so)
If I set some music down on digital media, I have surely improved the media, and it would be wrong to deprive me of the fruits of my labour by taking my improved media from me, but if you improve your own blank media, indistinguishable from mine, by setting music down from memory as you remember hearing it on mine, you have not deprived me of the fruits of my labour.
Intellectual property is a fabrication and an illusion. It does not perform the same as the concept of material property. There is no ethical base for an Intellectual Property Right. Maybe, in a teleological sense we can justify an Intellectual Property Privilege, but we should all just stop using "IP" and Intellectual Property terms until we are sure we all agree exactly what they mean. We should understand them at least as well as the basis for "life, Liberty, and property" which became the model philosophy for American politics.
Information does not have the property of scarcity like Locke's apples. The more you share information, the more there is! (Let's not split hairs, I can demonstrate this aside..) Good or bad, news or propaganda, sharing magnifies it. This is opposite of real property. The more you share a bowl of rice, the less there is to go around. Our laws should not gloss this fundamental difference over.
The problem with normalizing the servers is that your non-technical businesspeople are retarded from learning the interdependencies of the systems and the business. The costs, risks, and benefits of any system directly emanate from the impact they have on the operation of the business. Your MBA doesn't really know *any* details about the operation of either the business or the systems or the people that execute those details.
This kind of reporting is just upper-executive grandstanding, trying to reinforce the justification for their astronomical salaries. Look at the numbers. They are designed specifically to make it seem like the proponents of such work are making decisions with consequences that dwarf their salaries. The inferences are drawn from overgeneralized facts, and the conclusions ignore the significance of overlooked factors.
If you do not see the scientific explanation of "how to repeat this study in your situation" it is BULLSHIT!. YMMV: here, it holds just as true as anywhere else! Now what are we paying these jokers for?
The "invisible hand" of market forces does not always outperform a regulated piece of social infrastructure. It's high time we started the dialogue between the lassais faire capitalist/libertarian crowd and the socialists.
You see, a free market cannot exist without the social infrastructure of a legal system and a police state to enforce it, and the critical consensus to support good social infrastructure cannot exist without the freedom to violate the social norms and critically compare actual alternatives. We live in a mixed economy, both social infrastructure and free-market aspects are necessary. Some things should be given: free (peer-to-peer) telecommunications for all! Otherwise you have a "closed" free market with limited internal market forces to regulate it.
We should socialize the Internet as a free (as in beer ALSO as in freedom) resource to STIMULATE the free market part of society by providing more pressures from everyone. You have to look at what is going on and ask yourself: "could it be better? Should it be more cooperative or competitive? Where is the balance? Why?"
Re:Is it still crippleware?
on
The Be Lives!
·
· Score: 2
I used the HDImage-mounted-on-FAT32 to set up a Be partition, and ran the installer to install the OS there. Then I used the cool BeOS boot menu to go between BeOS, FreeBSD, and Windeews.
I never had any problem getting MP3s to play. They just worked... very Mac like... moreso than OS-X even.
I never held out for SSL in NetPositive. I thought the Mozilla people would blow it away eventually.
I still find that I wish MacOSX could do some BeOS things... like the fluid abstraction of any audio type in the Finder.. and burning CDs more like BeOS...
All BeOS would have needed was good hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers and it would have become a preferred gaming platform. I would have rebooted into BeOS just to play games. The game IDE would have followed very quickly...
Sun is a HARDWARE company. Their hardware ROCKS. Soon, FreeBSD will run on Sun hardware. When it does, Solaris will not be threatened. Big database vendors will continue to support Solaris because it is the pet OS of the very smart Sun engineers who produce the *Sparc hardware platforms. I use FreeBSD at home, and wherever I can at work, but I use Solaris at work to provide the juice for our big databases. It goes real fast. It goes on boxen with 4-64 processors. FreeBSD has a while to catch up with that.
I'm not sure if this guy is a troll and I should have refrained from this post, but hopefully people will get something out of my response. Turning lemons into lemonade y'know..
If I had known it would spark a philosophical debate, I would have narrowed my defenition of "trust." I'm sorry if I twisted your noodle.
Trusting the sun to come up is a little bit^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSIGNIFICANTLY different than trusting Microsoft to refrain from buggering up your machine on an automated update.
It's even further than the potable drink thing: actually GingerAle is very effective rat poison. Rats can't expel gas (belch or fart), so when they drink carbonated liquids, their distended little bellies explode.
I'm sorry, but I have to bring an empirical distinction to bear on my defenition of trust. Statisticians can calculate a (alpha), or significance, for a particular principle if you state it as a repeatable trial: If you do this, then your result will be that. The alpha is the percentage of time that reality will confound your hypothesis if the trial is repeated infinitely regardless of whether you are wrong or right. Some hypotheses will have an alpha between 0.5 and 0.75. The kind of trust you put in those (if you're wise) is "suspicious." Some hypotheses have an alpha that approaches zero ( 0.05 is the accepted minimum practical scientific alpha ). These hypotheses are trustworthy on a different level.
HERE HERE! I'll drink to that! There is no such thing as implicit trust, and if you think there is, please send me a blank check. I agree not to abuse it;)
I work. I get paid. I stop working; I stop getting paid. Some people have set up systems with "residual" income. They want to work, get paid, stop working, and keep getting paid. That's the Metallica plan, and the Hillary Rosen plan (she gets paid for help running the residual income racket for Metallica).
Without DRM, you make recordings/films, and give them away. Even if you charge for them and some people pay lots of people are going to see/hear it without you getting a dime from them. Then people (might, if your stuff doesn't SUCK) want to go see a live show or a big-screen showing of your work. You can charge admission to the closed event. You can show stuff in the event that you haven't given away. You stop working; you stop getting paid; you'd better have a savings plan!
Residual income is not economic production. It is pure monopoly rent. Either you believe in competition and the marketplace or you don't. Art is better off without the strong controls of a "sponsorship" system where you need a rich person to give your work the thumbs-up before you are "let in" to the closed distribution system.
The people pushing for DRM are the "golden handcuffs" vendors who offer the age-old devil's sell out contract. They would like to remove the option of not selling your soul. They almost have. This is not about making sure people pay for the art they see/hear. This is about media companies making sure there is no art without getting the biggest cut of the action.
They want to throttle our art to decrease supply and advertise to bolster demand so they can raise prices and fatten up the margin. It is all about setting up a monopoly and price controls and other stuff that slips past the Sherman Act.
They want to prevent artists from reaching people except through them. IT IS A RACKET!
The reason this is a problem is that nebulous shrug of an answer to the question "Who are you trusting to provide this code which you execute?" It could be an anonymous PGP/GPG key, but to violate people's trust would mean that trusted token is no longer trusted, and thus it would identify the other risks out there.
Imagine the tcpdump distributions were signed by an anonymous key. We could look over the code, and decide to trust that key. Later, people would be able to tacitly trust that key to sign tcpdump tarballs. One day, the tcpdump code will fail to match the signature: it will be caught before being executed, and the trojan will be discovered quickly. Later, another trojan will appear, but the signature will match. A few people will be bit, but the key will be exposed and others will be able to quickly identify their risk.
At the VERY LEAST, use MD5 sums on the files like FreeBSD ports!
No matter if they have, no true Mac user would ever say so, and you know it.
No, sometimes simple Aqua dialog boxes seem slower than a comparable interface in MSWin or KDE or Gnome (even Enlightenment). However, I'm noticing that the slow ones are Carbon based, and I *suspect* that it is legacy event-loop code for MacOS-9 yielding for the cooperative-multitasking OS compatibility. Other things, like ChimChim, exceed your expectations.
The thing I can say about MacOS-X is that it is comparable to the performance of my Athlon 1600, but it runs at 667MHz for 4-5 hours untethered. If I wanted blistering fast at all costs, I'd skip the MSWin crap, and run Solaris 9 on a Sun Blade 2000 dual 1GHz UltrasparcIII. THOSE puppies are FAST! You wouldn't know you're running crappy sloppy over-inherited over-threaded Java classes for your app's GUI interface.
It's called "Xinerama" and it's part of XFree86 4. Your window manager is probably capable of application/windowID/group position memory, etc. I know Gnome/E and Gnome/Sawfish are, and I suspect KDE is also. You can do a helluvalot in xrdb, which is all the windowmanagers do... and you can do that however you wanna.
This is for anyone in general who is sympathetic to the Yale crackpot.
"Awareness of it makes things complicated." No, awareness of "it" makes things simple. You can use an OS in a state of Zen, in the same way a swimmer uses the water. Being aware of the flow of cause-and-effect (karma) is enlightenment. The four noble truths are just as relevant in computers as any other breathing activity a person can engage in.
1. Dukkha: There is suffering. 2. Samudaya: You observe how the suffering arises. 3. Nirodha: You know that things that arise, will die with their supporting conditions cease, and so the suffering will end. 4. Magga: Because you are aware of how the suffering will cease, you know what to do to avoid the suffering by becoming aware of how you link to the causes of the suffering.
It is the awareness of how things are that allows you to extinguish the suffering with the most elegant (in)action. It is the dawning of awareness that relieves you from the gravity of the seriousness of your problems. So it is in life, and so it is living with software, and so it is living with software called an OS. It is all just the ebb and flow of causes and effects as the causes of other effects.
People will say a tool is less effective if you are acutely aware of it and that it should be "an extension of yourself." I disagree, and one should struggle to shed identification with tool-things, including your own body, and use the tool without reliance on a connection to your fantasy "self."
Even the most simple things are difficult if you appreciate them fully! Once you decide to stop polluting your own life, you can begin to appreciate the mess you will always be in. Longing for a "transparent system" is the old existential idea of "crystal palace" and will only expose the fact that you have no purpose through which this conduit will conduct you. What's to say you will be able to handle any "email" once the MUA hides the fact that it arrived through disparate and incompatible means? Dude, you're still going to have trouble swallowing that bad news... Let go of your tanha (thirst/lust). If you feel impeded because you aren't sure what to do next, then stop! Don't do anything! Be cool with that! Not everyone should be zooming around through cyberspace the same way.
I'm EXTREMELY allergic to the spores of the fungus that eats old dry paper and bookbinder's paste. In my case, your argument sounds like "there's almost no smell as comforting to the soul as the smell of an impending asthma attack."
When the commercial vendor supplies you with a quote for support, does that include access to the source code if their company folds and you get the crappy end of bankruptcy? Are they even promising to support you for 10 years? Will your change-management requirements down the road be dictated by the contract you sign with them?
You need to be VERY careful to account for ALL the hidden costs on BOTH SIDES. For examples, look for studies that compare outsourcing to in-house development. Once you discount the costs of coming up with the architectural components, you still have to pay someone to configure, install, support, and maintain the product.
If you throw in "community involvement" like hosting a CVS server, you can get significant (but unknowable) contributions toward the general maturity of the product for FREE. Represent this as a risk of not getting free development work in your cost model, and the chance of getting any work for free on the commercial product is equally possible to the free software, but it is probablistically insignificant.
The vendor is going to take profit from any savings that might be realized from reusing your solution in another governmental unit. Go looking for a way to share the support costs in others' budgets! Basically, you *give* them what you have, so long as they agree to mirror the CVS server on their own hardware, and allow you to merge changes into your tree from theirs. Eventually (in maintenance phase) you will probably want to merge both projects and just have monthly conference calls about any commits/contributed patches.
Now, are you treating your free software solution as free-as-in-beer or free-as-in-freedom? You have to understand how the commercial software vendors make money and use those techniques (wherever you can) to get savings on your own!
While the article criticises the "plurality" vote taken from the popular vote, they fail to mention the overwhelming influence of "Single Member Districts" (SMD) and the "Electoral College" (EC). SMD consistently over-represents the top candidate's electors, and this is repeated in the EC as the electors' votes are aggregated at the state level, converting all of a state's electoral weight to favor the candidate that mustered a simple majority in a simple majority of electoral districts.
What you're inclined to assume when reading articles like Election Selection is that the goal of "voting" and "elections" is to accurately represent the aggregate "will of the people." Actually, the goal of the Presidential Election in the USA is to select the candidate without giving the choice over to a few voters in a close race. It's designed to make one candidate pull far ahead of the others early in the count at the expense of accurate representation.
The worst-case scenario is that a miniscule number of votes (even smaller number of eligible voters if turnout is poor) will decide against a clear popular majority. If you get votes from 51% of the people who turned out for the 2000 Presidential Election in the 11 top electoral states (plus Wyoming) you will win the election with 272 Electoral votes and only 40,278,397 popular votes. That popular vote is roughly 14% of the voting-age US population. If you assumed perfect turnout, that's still 30% of the population represented as an absolute majority in the electoral college.
The bottom line is there's lots of parameters in the voting system function, so you have to do more math than they mentioned in the article to make any conclusions. The problem is, Poli-Sci departments are often poorly funded, so who's going to do the research? Lobbyists! Be very wary of this whole voting reform stuff.
But part of the problem with the term "postmodern" is that it's used in so many ways that it is effectively meaningless outside of a particular context. I think these guys are basically playing around with that idea -- looking through the paper, they're mostly just having fun (maybe they get travel money for going to the conference).
Your objection is not new to the discussion of Postmodernism (or Existentialism) that I am familliar with. Postmodernists pose that the foundations of common logic (Cartesian cogito ergo sum, using my defenition as an example) are meaningless, but that statement is meaningless unless you can also pose something better. Therefore "Postmodern" is moot unless it is clearly defined in a way that makes cogito... obsolete. If someone beats you to the defenition, and you use the term with something else in mind, is it possible that an error in your thinking discredits the precursor uses of the term or the ideas that depend on it? No: you are talking apples and oranges without explicitly distinguishing the two. Claiming that clarity of communication, defenitions, requirements, or parameters is irrelevant supports the "mootness" of your conception of "postmodern."
It's equivalent to saying "You don't have to understand what I mean for me to accomplish my goal in writing this, so BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH." Coding equivalent sounds like "Your needs mean squat to me, so I'm going to hack together some spaghetti code and you can take it or leave it!"
"This is postmodern, which means I don't have to explain anything, because I say so." Do you see what I mean?
Academically, the money should be going to people who care about the quality of their work. That's what peer-review is all about. I think these guys are wasting everyone's time and money with their "postmodern programming" bullshit. It's bad. It's not uncommon, but it singularly sucks.
I happen to have a background in postmodern philosophy. Modernism is Cartesian Dualism: mind/body dichotomy of perspective. Postmodernism is anything that carefully and explicitly avoids any dependence on that idea.
Here, the Kiwis seem to have attempted an aphorism which carefully and explicitly avoids explaining what in the hell Modernism or Postmodernism has to do with Computer Science, hence fails to distinguish the two, and brazenly says that "no requirements can be both complete
and consistent."
They set the bar so low for this "paper" (I looked at a PDF) that I'm considering writing a response in human feces, with my ass, on a roll of paper towel to see if they would accept it.
Slashdot Mirror
<sarcasm>
That makes me feel more secure... I mean, now, I don't have to worry about whether I should clean up the logs or not. It's not an option. One less thing to worry about.
</sarcasm>
Then again, the hardest thing about finding a needle in a haystack isn't sorting out the hay. You really have a tough time finding a needle in a bunch of other needles.. --er, log entries.
To be continued...
Some hasty Googling yields:
Historical Development of Copyright in Europe before 1886
IP Guide Background
Right now, we have to lay the foundations of this discussion to rest so we can get right to the point and avoid arguing things we agree on. If there are more pertinent references available to support your opinion, please post the links.
Thank you for the historical reference. Now, I can begin to research what you would not or could not explain. I will post a reply, in an un-troll like tactic designed to give the readers some factual basis for my assertions lowering the barrier of research a bit, so that they can participate without being ignorant. (lesson two in how to argue in a public forum).
I disagree. I do so with authority. If something I have said misled you, I humbly request that you provide the base for this false inference so that I may clarify my previous expression. You also imagine purpose and malice behind this false conclusion. If you ask specifically, I will assure you that I have no malice. The purpose is moot. I authoritatively deny that you have stated my intention.
I regret that I cannot continue to participate in this discussion if I am the only contributor. I expect that if you wish to continue this dialog, you will continue to contribute arguable detail in excess of your blithe flaming. I'm not here as free entertainment to the tired, obsolete, and socially inept. If it doesn't serve the general readership, it doesn't meet my criterion, and it is thus badly ended. If all you want is the last word, then I concede. I am afraid your mind is too old to be changed anyways.
What I would like to see, if you are up to it, is the full demonstration (geometric proof?) of how you arrived at the inference that I purposefully and maliciously wish to abolish copyright. That's three false conclusions to defend: the wish, the purpose, and the malice. I respect you for the wisdom you may have, or will come to have, even if you have bitten off more than you can chew this time. Because you are trying, you are wise. What you can say is not a reflection of who you are.
Troll, this is not the first time I've had to teach someone *how* to argue, but unless you are retarded or careless I think it is the first time you were taught how to argue. BTW: What part of any person's education would be most relevant here? Hrm?
All flames aside --I know: it IS fun-- though: The fact that I have to ask "What in the hell are you talking about?", whereas you did not, proves that my argument is more effective than yours. Please read carefully: I need help understanding what you mean.
Now, I *think* you are suggesting that there is a proof that my argument is false based on French history, and then you suggest I am uneducated. I would like to know which idea of mine won't work, and a reference to the history that you allude to. I would also like to know what you mean by "uneducated" and "intelligent" so that I can satisfy the (thus poorly worded) criteria of your appreciation.
BTW: I have a BS in Political Theory and Comparative Politics, minored in Philosophy, so while I may not be able to meet *YOUR* expectations, you are a fool for expecting MORE education in these matters from people you do not know. You are the father of your own discontent! I can help you achieve more realistic expectations though, so revenons a nos moutons! (That's a french expression which means "let's get back to the business at hand." You can get the rest from Babelfish)
Property, as we know it, is a legal definition set down in our tradition by John Locke. It is confined in Locke's conception as things which can be found in the common, improved by individuals, and which also become scarce when they are used. Locke's example is apples growing on trees become a man's property when he "mixes his labour" with them in the process of collection. A collection of shiny apples is surely improved over scattered apples amongst bruised and wormeaten ones. When another person happens on the collected nice apples, it would be wrong to deny the first man the benefit of his "labour" by taking apples from his pile. (maybe I remember this totally wrong.. correct me if so)
If I set some music down on digital media, I have surely improved the media, and it would be wrong to deprive me of the fruits of my labour by taking my improved media from me, but if you improve your own blank media, indistinguishable from mine, by setting music down from memory as you remember hearing it on mine, you have not deprived me of the fruits of my labour.
Intellectual property is a fabrication and an illusion. It does not perform the same as the concept of material property. There is no ethical base for an Intellectual Property Right. Maybe, in a teleological sense we can justify an Intellectual Property Privilege, but we should all just stop using "IP" and Intellectual Property terms until we are sure we all agree exactly what they mean. We should understand them at least as well as the basis for "life, Liberty, and property" which became the model philosophy for American politics.
Information does not have the property of scarcity like Locke's apples. The more you share information, the more there is! (Let's not split hairs, I can demonstrate this aside..) Good or bad, news or propaganda, sharing magnifies it. This is opposite of real property. The more you share a bowl of rice, the less there is to go around. Our laws should not gloss this fundamental difference over.
The problem with normalizing the servers is that your non-technical businesspeople are retarded from learning the interdependencies of the systems and the business. The costs, risks, and benefits of any system directly emanate from the impact they have on the operation of the business. Your MBA doesn't really know *any* details about the operation of either the business or the systems or the people that execute those details.
This kind of reporting is just upper-executive grandstanding, trying to reinforce the justification for their astronomical salaries. Look at the numbers. They are designed specifically to make it seem like the proponents of such work are making decisions with consequences that dwarf their salaries. The inferences are drawn from overgeneralized facts, and the conclusions ignore the significance of overlooked factors.
If you do not see the scientific explanation of "how to repeat this study in your situation" it is BULLSHIT!. YMMV: here, it holds just as true as anywhere else! Now what are we paying these jokers for?
The "invisible hand" of market forces does not always outperform a regulated piece of social infrastructure. It's high time we started the dialogue between the lassais faire capitalist/libertarian crowd and the socialists.
You see, a free market cannot exist without the social infrastructure of a legal system and a police state to enforce it, and the critical consensus to support good social infrastructure cannot exist without the freedom to violate the social norms and critically compare actual alternatives. We live in a mixed economy, both social infrastructure and free-market aspects are necessary. Some things should be given: free (peer-to-peer) telecommunications for all! Otherwise you have a "closed" free market with limited internal market forces to regulate it.
We should socialize the Internet as a free (as in beer ALSO as in freedom) resource to STIMULATE the free market part of society by providing more pressures from everyone. You have to look at what is going on and ask yourself: "could it be better? Should it be more cooperative or competitive? Where is the balance? Why?"
I used the HDImage-mounted-on-FAT32 to set up a Be partition, and ran the installer to install the OS there. Then I used the cool BeOS boot menu to go between BeOS, FreeBSD, and Windeews.
I never had any problem getting MP3s to play. They just worked... very Mac like... moreso than OS-X even.
I never held out for SSL in NetPositive. I thought the Mozilla people would blow it away eventually.
I still find that I wish MacOSX could do some BeOS things... like the fluid abstraction of any audio type in the Finder.. and burning CDs more like BeOS...
All BeOS would have needed was good hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers and it would have become a preferred gaming platform. I would have rebooted into BeOS just to play games. The game IDE would have followed very quickly...
Sun is a HARDWARE company. Their hardware ROCKS. Soon, FreeBSD will run on Sun hardware. When it does, Solaris will not be threatened. Big database vendors will continue to support Solaris because it is the pet OS of the very smart Sun engineers who produce the *Sparc hardware platforms. I use FreeBSD at home, and wherever I can at work, but I use Solaris at work to provide the juice for our big databases. It goes real fast. It goes on boxen with 4-64 processors. FreeBSD has a while to catch up with that.
I'm not sure if this guy is a troll and I should have refrained from this post, but hopefully people will get something out of my response. Turning lemons into lemonade y'know..
If I had known it would spark a philosophical debate, I would have narrowed my defenition of "trust." I'm sorry if I twisted your noodle.
Trusting the sun to come up is a little bit^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSIGNIFICANTLY different than trusting Microsoft to refrain from buggering up your machine on an automated update.
It's even further than the potable drink thing: actually GingerAle is very effective rat poison. Rats can't expel gas (belch or fart), so when they drink carbonated liquids, their distended little bellies explode.
I'm sorry, but I have to bring an empirical distinction to bear on my defenition of trust. Statisticians can calculate a (alpha), or significance, for a particular principle if you state it as a repeatable trial: If you do this, then your result will be that. The alpha is the percentage of time that reality will confound your hypothesis if the trial is repeated infinitely regardless of whether you are wrong or right. Some hypotheses will have an alpha between 0.5 and 0.75. The kind of trust you put in those (if you're wise) is "suspicious." Some hypotheses have an alpha that approaches zero ( 0.05 is the accepted minimum practical scientific alpha ). These hypotheses are trustworthy on a different level.
HERE HERE! I'll drink to that! There is no such thing as implicit trust, and if you think there is, please send me a blank check. I agree not to abuse it ;)
DRM only helps the middlemen monopoly
I work. I get paid. I stop working; I stop getting paid. Some people have set up systems with "residual" income. They want to work, get paid, stop working, and keep getting paid. That's the Metallica plan, and the Hillary Rosen plan (she gets paid for help running the residual income racket for Metallica).
Without DRM, you make recordings/films, and give them away. Even if you charge for them and some people pay lots of people are going to see/hear it without you getting a dime from them. Then people (might, if your stuff doesn't SUCK) want to go see a live show or a big-screen showing of your work. You can charge admission to the closed event. You can show stuff in the event that you haven't given away. You stop working; you stop getting paid; you'd better have a savings plan!
Residual income is not economic production. It is pure monopoly rent. Either you believe in competition and the marketplace or you don't. Art is better off without the strong controls of a "sponsorship" system where you need a rich person to give your work the thumbs-up before you are "let in" to the closed distribution system.
The people pushing for DRM are the "golden handcuffs" vendors who offer the age-old devil's sell out contract. They would like to remove the option of not selling your soul. They almost have. This is not about making sure people pay for the art they see/hear. This is about media companies making sure there is no art without getting the biggest cut of the action.
They want to throttle our art to decrease supply and advertise to bolster demand so they can raise prices and fatten up the margin. It is all about setting up a monopoly and price controls and other stuff that slips past the Sherman Act.
They want to prevent artists from reaching people except through them. IT IS A RACKET!
Goes without saying, but maybe I expect too much of the average user?
Yes, for your own sake, and the sakes of everyone who trusts you: guard your private key(s) with teeth!
The reason this is a problem is that nebulous shrug of an answer to the question "Who are you trusting to provide this code which you execute?" It could be an anonymous PGP/GPG key, but to violate people's trust would mean that trusted token is no longer trusted, and thus it would identify the other risks out there.
Imagine the tcpdump distributions were signed by an anonymous key. We could look over the code, and decide to trust that key. Later, people would be able to tacitly trust that key to sign tcpdump tarballs. One day, the tcpdump code will fail to match the signature: it will be caught before being executed, and the trojan will be discovered quickly. Later, another trojan will appear, but the signature will match. A few people will be bit, but the key will be exposed and others will be able to quickly identify their risk.
At the VERY LEAST, use MD5 sums on the files like FreeBSD ports!
No, sometimes simple Aqua dialog boxes seem slower than a comparable interface in MSWin or KDE or Gnome (even Enlightenment). However, I'm noticing that the slow ones are Carbon based, and I *suspect* that it is legacy event-loop code for MacOS-9 yielding for the cooperative-multitasking OS compatibility. Other things, like ChimChim, exceed your expectations.
The thing I can say about MacOS-X is that it is comparable to the performance of my Athlon 1600, but it runs at 667MHz for 4-5 hours untethered. If I wanted blistering fast at all costs, I'd skip the MSWin crap, and run Solaris 9 on a Sun Blade 2000 dual 1GHz UltrasparcIII. THOSE puppies are FAST! You wouldn't know you're running crappy sloppy over-inherited over-threaded Java classes for your app's GUI interface.
It's called "Xinerama" and it's part of XFree86 4. Your window manager is probably capable of application/windowID/group position memory, etc. I know Gnome/E and Gnome/Sawfish are, and I suspect KDE is also. You can do a helluvalot in xrdb, which is all the windowmanagers do... and you can do that however you wanna.
This is for anyone in general who is sympathetic to the Yale crackpot.
"Awareness of it makes things complicated." No, awareness of "it" makes things simple. You can use an OS in a state of Zen, in the same way a swimmer uses the water. Being aware of the flow of cause-and-effect (karma) is enlightenment. The four noble truths are just as relevant in computers as any other breathing activity a person can engage in.
1. Dukkha: There is suffering. 2. Samudaya: You observe how the suffering arises. 3. Nirodha: You know that things that arise, will die with their supporting conditions cease, and so the suffering will end. 4. Magga: Because you are aware of how the suffering will cease, you know what to do to avoid the suffering by becoming aware of how you link to the causes of the suffering.
It is the awareness of how things are that allows you to extinguish the suffering with the most elegant (in)action. It is the dawning of awareness that relieves you from the gravity of the seriousness of your problems. So it is in life, and so it is living with software, and so it is living with software called an OS. It is all just the ebb and flow of causes and effects as the causes of other effects.
People will say a tool is less effective if you are acutely aware of it and that it should be "an extension of yourself." I disagree, and one should struggle to shed identification with tool-things, including your own body, and use the tool without reliance on a connection to your fantasy "self."
Even the most simple things are difficult if you appreciate them fully! Once you decide to stop polluting your own life, you can begin to appreciate the mess you will always be in. Longing for a "transparent system" is the old existential idea of "crystal palace" and will only expose the fact that you have no purpose through which this conduit will conduct you. What's to say you will be able to handle any "email" once the MUA hides the fact that it arrived through disparate and incompatible means? Dude, you're still going to have trouble swallowing that bad news... Let go of your tanha (thirst/lust). If you feel impeded because you aren't sure what to do next, then stop! Don't do anything! Be cool with that! Not everyone should be zooming around through cyberspace the same way.
This sounds like Google and their Page Ranking for search results.
I don't care how many times I hear this gag, it works! It's just good comedy!
I'm EXTREMELY allergic to the spores of the fungus that eats old dry paper and bookbinder's paste. In my case, your argument sounds like "there's almost no smell as comforting to the soul as the smell of an impending asthma attack."
DIY != 10 year support contract
When the commercial vendor supplies you with a quote for support, does that include access to the source code if their company folds and you get the crappy end of bankruptcy? Are they even promising to support you for 10 years? Will your change-management requirements down the road be dictated by the contract you sign with them?
You need to be VERY careful to account for ALL the hidden costs on BOTH SIDES. For examples, look for studies that compare outsourcing to in-house development. Once you discount the costs of coming up with the architectural components, you still have to pay someone to configure, install, support, and maintain the product.
If you throw in "community involvement" like hosting a CVS server, you can get significant (but unknowable) contributions toward the general maturity of the product for FREE. Represent this as a risk of not getting free development work in your cost model, and the chance of getting any work for free on the commercial product is equally possible to the free software, but it is probablistically insignificant.
The vendor is going to take profit from any savings that might be realized from reusing your solution in another governmental unit. Go looking for a way to share the support costs in others' budgets! Basically, you *give* them what you have, so long as they agree to mirror the CVS server on their own hardware, and allow you to merge changes into your tree from theirs. Eventually (in maintenance phase) you will probably want to merge both projects and just have monthly conference calls about any commits/contributed patches.
Now, are you treating your free software solution as free-as-in-beer or free-as-in-freedom? You have to understand how the commercial software vendors make money and use those techniques (wherever you can) to get savings on your own!
While the article criticises the "plurality" vote taken from the popular vote, they fail to mention the overwhelming influence of "Single Member Districts" (SMD) and the "Electoral College" (EC). SMD consistently over-represents the top candidate's electors, and this is repeated in the EC as the electors' votes are aggregated at the state level, converting all of a state's electoral weight to favor the candidate that mustered a simple majority in a simple majority of electoral districts.
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/Census00/FedRep.phtWhat you're inclined to assume when reading articles like Election Selection is that the goal of "voting" and "elections" is to accurately represent the aggregate "will of the people." Actually, the goal of the Presidential Election in the USA is to select the candidate without giving the choice over to a few voters in a close race. It's designed to make one candidate pull far ahead of the others early in the count at the expense of accurate representation.
The worst-case scenario is that a miniscule number of votes (even smaller number of eligible voters if turnout is poor) will decide against a clear popular majority. If you get votes from 51% of the people who turned out for the 2000 Presidential Election in the 11 top electoral states (plus Wyoming) you will win the election with 272 Electoral votes and only 40,278,397 popular votes. That popular vote is roughly 14% of the voting-age US population. If you assumed perfect turnout, that's still 30% of the population represented as an absolute majority in the electoral college.
The bottom line is there's lots of parameters in the voting system function, so you have to do more math than they mentioned in the article to make any conclusions. The problem is, Poli-Sci departments are often poorly funded, so who's going to do the research? Lobbyists! Be very wary of this whole voting reform stuff.
Your objection is not new to the discussion of Postmodernism (or Existentialism) that I am familliar with. Postmodernists pose that the foundations of common logic (Cartesian cogito ergo sum, using my defenition as an example) are meaningless, but that statement is meaningless unless you can also pose something better. Therefore "Postmodern" is moot unless it is clearly defined in a way that makes cogito... obsolete. If someone beats you to the defenition, and you use the term with something else in mind, is it possible that an error in your thinking discredits the precursor uses of the term or the ideas that depend on it? No: you are talking apples and oranges without explicitly distinguishing the two. Claiming that clarity of communication, defenitions, requirements, or parameters is irrelevant supports the "mootness" of your conception of "postmodern."
It's equivalent to saying "You don't have to understand what I mean for me to accomplish my goal in writing this, so BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH." Coding equivalent sounds like "Your needs mean squat to me, so I'm going to hack together some spaghetti code and you can take it or leave it!" "This is postmodern, which means I don't have to explain anything, because I say so." Do you see what I mean?
Academically, the money should be going to people who care about the quality of their work. That's what peer-review is all about. I think these guys are wasting everyone's time and money with their "postmodern programming" bullshit. It's bad. It's not uncommon, but it singularly sucks.
I happen to have a background in postmodern philosophy. Modernism is Cartesian Dualism: mind/body dichotomy of perspective. Postmodernism is anything that carefully and explicitly avoids any dependence on that idea.
Here, the Kiwis seem to have attempted an aphorism which carefully and explicitly avoids explaining what in the hell Modernism or Postmodernism has to do with Computer Science, hence fails to distinguish the two, and brazenly says that "no requirements can be both complete and consistent."
They set the bar so low for this "paper" (I looked at a PDF) that I'm considering writing a response in human feces, with my ass, on a roll of paper towel to see if they would accept it.