ok, so we're getting neo-con christian family-values rhetoric (marriage is the greatest thing, discipline your kids to be happy little corporate slaves) modded up to 5 on slashdot now are we?
here's the anti-rhetoric:
if you're married, then you've been suckered
marriage is just a social delusion, easily dissolved by divorce (that is if you don't yet have kids)
really, really think if you want kids, or whether you're just going along with the breeding desires of your 'lovely' wife
...that the software equivalent of the Republican Guard, as it were, is withdrawing into the streets of Redmond for a last stand.
Sorry. I think nearly everywhere outside the U.S. of A. most people would be likening Microsoft to the U.S. imperial army and not the Iraqi freedom fighters.
I'm an australian and I certainly do.
Wouldn't have made this observation however, if you hadn't first brought in such an insensitive analogy.
and yes, english grammar is just beginning to get over being treated as a latin language for 200 years (or course it's not, it's germanic)
and finally, i agree that the them/their usage is a very elegant solution
Re:A short history of how the U.S. got into this m
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 1
congrats on the posting which managed to be light on the rhetoric and well linked to substantial claims of fact
however, as this is an american-based and american dominated site, and it still seems that the majority of americans do not want to be presented with the evil that the U.S. of A. government and it's corporations are perpetrating in the world, i fear you are now about to be modded all the way down
william gibson uses 'google' several times as a verb in his latest (dissapointing) novel, pattern recognition
my thought was he was just trying for another citation in the complete oed - but the word had probably been used in print before - anyone know any other examples?
have the illegal actions of the u.s. of a. in militarily and covertly attacking and destabilising many, many nations throughout the world over the last 50 years, finally caught up with this world class bully, which is increasingly resembling an old ill eagle?
Even those who purport to understand Japanese culture around here (and then proceed to talk about manga as child porn) are so off base I just had to act...
by spreading further misinformation yrself?
The Japanese are very visual people, which is why karaoke is so popular?
and I would argue that their alphabet itself japanese does not have an alphabet - it has kanji (chinese characters) and two syllabic notations - hiragana and katakana
- which is itself entirely symbolic - is one of the root causes for this.
nearly all of the kanji are abstract and not at all symbolic - ppl such as yrself often make too much of the fact that some of the characters are obvious ideograms and extrapolate that to all kanji - while they may (or their consituent parts) have had their roots in pictorial representation, that was thousands of years ago and they have become highly abstracted now - you may as well argue that the roman alphabet is ideogramatic as it too had it's roots in pictorial representations
In other Asian countries you see similar phenomena (illustrated literature is very popular in Korea as well, for example).
why use bogus concepts such as race or the even more meaningless concept 'asian' - countries included in Asia use many writing systems, and the one that you have picked on - Korea - is very ironic, as the korean alphabet is regarded by linguists as perhaps the best phonetic alphabet in the world (i.e. best one-to-one match up between representation and sounds) and is entirely non-pictorial
maybe you should get a clue, go read some marshall mcluhan and some serious books about asian writing systems before posing as an expert simply cos you hooked up with some japanese girl while hanging out in japan (most likely tokyo i presume)
i currently volunteer at an inner-city organic farm in brisbane australia. we are looking into composting human manure on our site and this looks to be a very valuable reference
following a link to the publisher's page i discovered that not only is the full text of the book offered freely online, but also the publisher provides complete dead-treee copies free of charge to non-profit organisations anywhere in the world
to my mind this is an extraordinary example of philanthropy and ecological activism
we will be ordering a couple of books and paying for them (as we have the means) but i would still like to thank the authour and publisher for their work and generosity
buckminster fuller, who coined many terms, among them synergy, came up with two words to describe application of technology - killingry and livingry
ok, they're not as hip sounding as synergy, but i'm sure you get what they mean - and buck fuller devoted his life to creating livingy such as the geodesic dome and his many other inventions
so why, i wonder, when the article in new scientist has nothing to say about 'defense' applications are there so many posts like yours inthis thread about using this invention in military applications? to quote george w bush out of context, you're either with us or against us - on the side of livingry or on the side of killingry
if we are ever going to have mega-porcessor interaction
My friend! Prepare to contain your joy 'cos mega-porcessor technology is already here - see press release below.
Porcine Technologies Press Release April 1, 2002
Porcine Technologies Inc, is pleased to announce, after 14 years of continuous research and development, the first public offering of it's mega-porcessor computing technology.
Mega-porcessors are a completely new approach to computing, directly incorporating the exciting new worlds of genetic engineering and pattern recognition or phenotropic computing.
Professor Clive Bacon, Porcine Technologies Chief Research Officer explains the technology:
"Basically, the mega-porcessor is a genetically re-engineered large porcine scrofulus. The gut of the porcessor has been genetically engineered to be extremely sophisticated in pattern-recognition porcessiong. Problems are solved by coding the data set into an ingestible porcine feedmeal. This is then fed to the mega-porcessor whereupon the porcessor falls into a torpid state as it's gut quickly assimilates the data-set. We've done a lot of work to accelerate this process and really make these pigs fly.
Once the dataset feedmeal has been fully porcessed in the gut and it's inherent patterns recognised and clarified the solution set to the problem is laid down as subcutaneous sebaceous material around the porcessors central porcessing unit (it's belly). This information transfer technique is referred to as Supine Porcessor Ameliorated Messaging (SPAM).
Finally the solution data-set needs to be communicated to the human operators. This is effected by terminating the porcessor (usually by slitting it's throat) and then serving up the solution-doped meat of the porcessor to the porcessor operators. Ingestion of this material communicates an intuitive answer to the problem dataset directly to the operator's stomach, giving them a 'gut feeling' about the initial problem and it's inherent solution."
Paul Jamon, CEO of Porcine Technologies, in launching the first three models (already dubbed the three little pigs) of this exciting and promising technology, also announced that development was nearing completion of it's second generation of the technology (BIGSOW) and that several large global enterprises were already testing the unique power of this larger body mass porcessor:
"We already have several large global enterprises excited about and actively using this second generation of our revolutionary technology. Today, people talk about using 'big iron' to run mission-critical information analysis. We envision a future, where in as short a time as five years from now, companies and their computing operators will increasingly be turning, napkin in hand, to 'big porc'."
without people prepared to bend their ethics there are no unethical games - a game only exists if it played, to be played it requires players
Just remember that it's not the tool, but how you use it.
This is the fundamental philosophy of the technocrat i.e. that tools are neutral - when fully examined this is completely bogus - tools are designed by people and have those people's moral frameworks built in i.e. if you do not believe in killing you do not design, manufacture and sell guns
the only 'tools' that are neutral are natural objects i.e. a big rock could never be considered a 'suspect' object even if it had been used to hit someone over the head - a land mine on the other hand will always be an evil object and an embodiement of the lapsed moral standards of it creators and manufacturers
i agree with you, the way to get back at these corporations is (to use microsoft parlance) 'cut off their air supply' i.e. don't ever provide them with revenue
on your reference to toy story, i have never actually seen it, and am interested to learn that it is a disney film - perhaps that should give the debian community pause to think about whether they want to give a nod towards the film by using the names of characters from the film for each successive release of debian i.e. potato, woody, sarge etc.
perhaps it would be good to use a work that is completely in the public domain instead? - i'd like to hereby suggest the names of the brothers in the brothers karamazov by dostoevsky - alexei, dmitri, ivan, pavel
ok we're getting seriously off-topic here (seeing as this thread is actually about microsofts 'open the source' announcement) but to answer a few points
I think you're paranoid. Apple is no threat whatsoever to Microsoft, OK? [...] As for "sizable number of users", I'd like to see the statistics for that.
My answer is that with microsoft's current domination of the browser market, it's east to forget that there is still a very large difference between say 95% market share (domination) and say 99.8% market share (total domination). If microsoft had total domination then the W3C's web standards would quickly become irrelevant and microsoft could dictate the course of html/hhtp/css/... evolution as most website developers would be relatively happy to lose out on the 'fringe' 0.2% who use browsers that don't recognise microsoft's extensions
however with say 5% (and growing) non-microsoft browser clients out there, web-site developers are forced to code html so that it works on other browsers, either by testing it on the other browsers or more simply by coding for w3c compliance
the latter option has become even more compelling now that it would not be satisfactory simply to check for mozilla compatibility but now also khtml compatibility as well
5% of the market is simply too much to ignore - seeing as that market includes a community generally acknowledged as 'hip' on design issues (the apple community) and that even if you don't mind missing out on that share, the users themselves will loudly complain, and even 5% of your audience feeling snubbed by you is not a good position to be in
I can't remember Microsoft ever taking defensive moves against Apple...
cheap shot, but this indicates you either haven't been around for very long, or have a very short memory
It's under the LGPL, which is why Apple had to contribute their changes back when they started redistributing them (in the form of a patch dump unfortunately) but they don't have to make Safari free software.
thanks for that information - someone had also confirmed that it was lgpl which is what i had expected - and thus, yes you're right then that the full browser does not have to be lgpl or gpl
well i wasn't wondering so much about what license safari is being released under, but what license khtml (the rendering engine now used by apple in their new browser, but initially developed and still actively developed for konqueror, the kde browser) is under - i went to the kdevelop website but couldn't find the answer, hence my open question on slashdot
to be more explicit, is khtml licensed under the gpl, lgpl or some other license which the free software foundation agrees is fully free, or is it licensed under some other 'open source' license?
i am not wanting to reignite a flamewar between these two philosophies, but i am curious and also would like to know so as to use the proper term when referring to the software
now with regard to the apsl, the fsf has a detailed page regarding the history of problems with the apsl (which has been covered on/. before)
the page details how flaws in the original version of the license (apsl 1.0) that were pointed out by the fsf have been fixed apart from one final one which is this aspect of the license:
Central control : Anyone who releases (or even uses, other than for R&D) a modified version is required to notify one specific organization, which happens to be Apple.
i'd just been reading coverage on apple's new safari browser and thinking how it was a significant 'hit' against microsoft internet explorer strategies as the boost given to 'the other' free software rendering engine (khtml) has now made complying to web-standards that much more important
wondering how this release was impacting microsoft's share price i went over to yahoo finance and was bemused to see that it was slightly up - and then noticed the links to news stories lower on the page detailing microsofts announcement
i can't help wonder if the announcement was timed to take some attention away from the extremely significant move by apple to move it's sizable number of users from a proprietary based browser to one at least based upon a free software engine
- microsoft must have worked out what was in the works some time ago (the project has been a year in dev) and macworld would be the obvious announcement time
i'll let others analyse and discuss the significance of this move by microsoft - and by the way i agree with those who contend that microsoft is not 'the enemy' and that as longer as we keep true to our values and keep doing what we have been doing all will continue to be well in free software land, and ripples from the movement will continue to spread through the software world from our activity whether we plan to make a splash or not
- but watching microsoft sure is great soap opera:)
p.s. i have been using the term 'free software' in the above post but am unsure of the exact license that khtml is under (i searched and couldn't find the info) - anyone who knows?
Slashdot Mirror
advice from the onion :
on this topic
you and me
plus baby
minus me
makes two
ok, so we're getting neo-con christian family-values rhetoric (marriage is the greatest thing, discipline your kids to be happy little corporate slaves) modded up to 5 on slashdot now are we?
here's the anti-rhetoric
...that the software equivalent of the Republican Guard, as it were, is withdrawing into the streets of Redmond for a last stand.
Sorry. I think nearly everywhere outside the U.S. of A. most people would be likening Microsoft to the U.S. imperial army and not the Iraqi freedom fighters.
I'm an australian and I certainly do.
Wouldn't have made this observation however, if you hadn't first brought in such an insensitive analogy.
They want to have the option of giving the US the finger.
Don't we all?
two words :
dream on
excellent post xtifr, thankyou
and yes, english grammar is just beginning to get over being treated as a latin language for 200 years (or course it's not, it's germanic)
and finally, i agree that the them/their usage is a very elegant solution
congrats on the posting which managed to be light on the rhetoric and well linked to substantial claims of fact
however, as this is an american-based and american dominated site, and it still seems that the majority of americans do not want to be presented with the evil that the U.S. of A. government and it's corporations are perpetrating in the world, i fear you are now about to be modded all the way down
just as a note of usage in print
william gibson uses 'google' several times as a verb in his latest (dissapointing) novel, pattern recognition
my thought was he was just trying for another citation in the complete oed - but the word had probably been used in print before - anyone know any other examples?
made me laugh, thanks
just riffing off yr spelling of illegal...
have the illegal actions of the u.s. of a. in militarily and covertly attacking and destabilising many, many nations throughout the world over the last 50 years, finally caught up with this world class bully, which is increasingly resembling an old ill eagle?
this sounds an interesting project and i intend to read more about it
- however, on first viewing the website, my very first impression is that they have one of the worst logos i have ever seen
to put it bluntly,
it looks like a pile of shit
with 3 or 4 flies buzzing around it
even when you work out that the picture is meant to represent a brain with musical notes hovering around it, it still looks really dumb
now, on to read about what sounds like a valuable project
Even those who purport to understand Japanese culture around here (and then proceed to talk about manga as child porn) are so off base I just had to act...
by spreading further misinformation yrself?
The Japanese are very visual people,
which is why karaoke is so popular?
and I would argue that their alphabet itself
japanese does not have an alphabet - it has kanji (chinese characters) and two syllabic notations - hiragana and katakana
- which is itself entirely symbolic - is one of the root causes for this.
nearly all of the kanji are abstract and not at all symbolic - ppl such as yrself often make too much of the fact that some of the characters are obvious ideograms and extrapolate that to all kanji - while they may (or their consituent parts) have had their roots in pictorial representation, that was thousands of years ago and they have become highly abstracted now - you may as well argue that the roman alphabet is ideogramatic as it too had it's roots in pictorial representations
In other Asian countries you see similar phenomena (illustrated literature is very popular in Korea as well, for example).
why use bogus concepts such as race or the even more meaningless concept 'asian' - countries included in Asia use many writing systems, and the one that you have picked on - Korea - is very ironic, as the korean alphabet is regarded by linguists as perhaps the best phonetic alphabet in the world (i.e. best one-to-one match up between representation and sounds) and is entirely non-pictorial
maybe you should get a clue, go read some marshall mcluhan and some serious books about asian writing systems before posing as an expert simply cos you hooked up with some japanese girl while hanging out in japan (most likely tokyo i presume)
i currently volunteer at an inner-city organic farm in brisbane australia. we are looking into composting human manure on our site and this looks to be a very valuable reference
following a link to the publisher's page i discovered that not only is the full text of the book offered freely online, but also the publisher provides complete dead-treee copies free of charge to non-profit organisations anywhere in the world
to my mind this is an extraordinary example of philanthropy and ecological activism
we will be ordering a couple of books and paying for them (as we have the means) but i would still like to thank the authour and publisher for their work and generosity
thanks for the correction
did a quick search on synergy+heylin+fuller which turned up this extract of the oed online which supports your advice
rhetoric analysis
music
true for jazz
false for the 98% crap of the last 30 years
result = 1/2 true
movies
all crap since at least the 50's
(ok there's the coen brothers but they
must be just a statistical blip)
result = false
software
true for RMS, donald knuth, mccarthy
false for microsoft, oracle etc
result = 1/2 true
fast pizza delivery
true for fast
false for 'you call that pizza?'
result = 1/2 true
total veracity score = 1.5 out of 4
takehome message - more crap rhetoric by this stephenson guy - why do ppl read that drivel?
this is funny!!?
fuck, i'd love to mod you
to the lowest level of hell
buckminster fuller, who coined many terms, among them synergy, came up with two words to describe application of technology - killingry and livingry
ok, they're not as hip sounding as synergy, but i'm sure you get what they mean - and buck fuller devoted his life to creating livingy such as the geodesic dome and his many other inventions
so why, i wonder, when the article in new scientist has nothing to say about 'defense' applications are there so many posts like yours inthis thread about using this invention in military applications? to quote george w bush out of context, you're either with us or against us - on the side of livingry or on the side of killingry
My friend! Prepare to contain your joy 'cos mega-porcessor technology is already here - see press release below.
Porcine Technologies
Press Release
April 1, 2002
Porcine Technologies Inc, is pleased to announce, after 14 years of continuous research and development, the first public offering of it's mega-porcessor computing technology.
Mega-porcessors are a completely new approach to computing, directly incorporating the exciting new worlds of genetic engineering and pattern recognition or phenotropic computing.
Professor Clive Bacon, Porcine Technologies Chief Research Officer explains the technology:
Paul Jamon, CEO of Porcine Technologies, in launching the first three models (already dubbed the three little pigs) of this exciting and promising technology, also announced that development was nearing completion of it's second generation of the technology (BIGSOW) and that several large global enterprises were already testing the unique power of this larger body mass porcessor
Don't hate tha playa, hate tha game."
no players -> no game
without people prepared to bend their ethics there are no unethical games - a game only exists if it played, to be played it requires players
Just remember that it's not the tool, but how you use it.
This is the fundamental philosophy of the technocrat i.e. that tools are neutral - when fully examined this is completely bogus - tools are designed by people and have those people's moral frameworks built in i.e. if you do not believe in killing you do not design, manufacture and sell guns
the only 'tools' that are neutral are natural objects i.e. a big rock could never be considered a 'suspect' object even if it had been used to hit someone over the head - a land mine on the other hand will always be an evil object and an embodiement of the lapsed moral standards of it creators and manufacturers
i agree with you, the way to get back at these corporations is (to use microsoft parlance) 'cut off their air supply' i.e. don't ever provide them with revenue
on your reference to toy story, i have never actually seen it, and am interested to learn that it is a disney film - perhaps that should give the debian community pause to think about whether they want to give a nod towards the film by using the names of characters from the film for each successive release of debian i.e. potato, woody, sarge etc.
perhaps it would be good to use a work that is completely in the public domain instead? - i'd like to hereby suggest the names of the brothers in the brothers karamazov by dostoevsky - alexei, dmitri, ivan, pavel
know it's not in th spirit of rapping (to revise) but how 'bout a slight change to make a better rhyme in the second line
thanks for that information mate
ok we're getting seriously off-topic here (seeing as this thread is actually about microsofts 'open the source' announcement) but to answer a few points
I think you're paranoid. Apple is no threat whatsoever to Microsoft, OK?
[...]
As for "sizable number of users", I'd like to see the statistics for that.
My answer is that with microsoft's current domination of the browser market, it's east to forget that there is still a very large difference between say 95% market share (domination) and say 99.8% market share (total domination). If microsoft had total domination then the W3C's web standards would quickly become irrelevant and microsoft could dictate the course of html/hhtp/css/... evolution as most website developers would be relatively happy to lose out on the 'fringe' 0.2% who use browsers that don't recognise microsoft's extensions
however with say 5% (and growing) non-microsoft browser clients out there, web-site developers are forced to code html so that it works on other browsers, either by testing it on the other browsers or more simply by coding for w3c compliance
the latter option has become even more compelling now that it would not be satisfactory simply to check for mozilla compatibility but now also khtml compatibility as well
5% of the market is simply too much to ignore - seeing as that market includes a community generally acknowledged as 'hip' on design issues (the apple community) and that even if you don't mind missing out on that share, the users themselves will loudly complain, and even 5% of your audience feeling snubbed by you is not a good position to be in
I can't remember Microsoft ever taking defensive moves against Apple...
cheap shot, but this indicates you either haven't been around for very long, or have a very short memory
It's under the LGPL, which is why Apple had to contribute their changes back when they started redistributing them (in the form of a patch dump unfortunately) but they don't have to make Safari free software.
thanks for that information - someone had also confirmed that it was lgpl which is what i had expected - and thus, yes you're right then that the full browser does not have to be lgpl or gpl
well i wasn't wondering so much about what license safari is being released under, but what license khtml (the rendering engine now used by apple in their new browser, but initially developed and still actively developed for konqueror, the kde browser) is under - i went to the kdevelop website but couldn't find the answer, hence my open question on slashdot
to be more explicit, is khtml licensed under the gpl, lgpl or some other license which the free software foundation agrees is fully free, or is it licensed under some other 'open source' license?
i am not wanting to reignite a flamewar between these two philosophies, but i am curious and also would like to know so as to use the proper term when referring to the software
now with regard to the apsl, the fsf has a detailed page regarding the history of problems with the apsl (which has been covered on
the page details how flaws in the original version of the license (apsl 1.0) that were pointed out by the fsf have been fixed apart from one final one which is this aspect of the license
i'd just been reading coverage on apple's new safari browser and thinking how it was a significant 'hit' against microsoft internet explorer strategies as the boost given to 'the other' free software rendering engine (khtml) has now made complying to web-standards that much more important
:)
wondering how this release was impacting microsoft's share price i went over to yahoo finance and was bemused to see that it was slightly up - and then noticed the links to news stories lower on the page detailing microsofts announcement
i can't help wonder if the announcement was timed to take some attention away from the extremely significant move by apple to move it's sizable number of users from a proprietary based browser to one at least based upon a free software engine
- microsoft must have worked out what was in the works some time ago (the project has been a year in dev) and macworld would be the obvious announcement time
i'll let others analyse and discuss the significance of this move by microsoft - and by the way i agree with those who contend that microsoft is not 'the enemy' and that as longer as we keep true to our values and keep doing what we have been doing all will continue to be well in free software land, and ripples from the movement will continue to spread through the software world from our activity whether we plan to make a splash or not
- but watching microsoft sure is great soap opera
p.s. i have been using the term 'free software' in the above post but am unsure of the exact license that khtml is under (i searched and couldn't find the info) - anyone who knows?