There's actually a good reason for irregularities... efficiency! No, really. It's clear that only common words display irregularities, new vocabulary acquisitions to a language almost always are regular (except when we are intentionally trying to be cute, like "Emacsen"). And usually, the irregularities are shorter than the regular versions.. "ate", one syllable, "eated", two. The words that get used the most are the ones that get the most irregular.
Since this is Slashdot, to put it in terms of C, "typedef eated ate;"
The hatred of politicians is well founded. Quite simply, you must lie to be a successful politician, and you must have a certain degree of cold-hearted sociopathy in order to be a good politician.
The job itself is dirty. It's very dirty. Everyone is going to try to corrupt you one way or another, sometimes legally, sometimes not. No matter what you do, you're going to piss someone off, so you need to discard some or most of your sense of empathy for your fellow humans.
And you will need to lie, sometimes, often, all the time. It's not so much the people who become politicians, it's just the job description.
It's default in the sense that if you stick in the recommended Gnome default desktop and just furiously click "next" during the installation, you'll get Gnome and Tomboy.
Admittedly, a free project like Netbeans doesn't have to accept contributions, but "Open Source" should mean a lot more than "you can see the source". It's confusion like the one you just expressed precisely why the "free" part of "FOSS" is also important.
Why do you use Adobe Reader in Debian? This is an honest question. I work all the time with PDFs, and I've been very happy with Evince, sometimes see what Okular is up to. Why do you need Adobe Reader? For forms?
The big notable exceptions are the projects that make contribution very easy and modular — the ones that allow a plugin architecture. Emacs, Firefox, and Compiz get lots of contributions, because if there's another feature you want, it's very easy to code it up as a plugin.
Slashdot is a bit late in reporting these news... I tried to submit them earlier when the news was fresher.
The problem at heart is that one of the biggest and evillest academic publishers, Elsevier, has been supporting a crackpot.
This shows that Elsevier isn't doing enough to promote the quality of research, and worse, libraries are paying huge fees with tax money for worthless journals. The problem here is bundling; university libraries have to buy in bundles journals, one of which may contain crackpot ideas as this one did.
I had a Rio MP3 player before an iPod, it had a music manager that only worked with the Rio, and I had to switch to iTunes when I got my iPod... so what??
My current music player is a Samsung YP-U2, which was half as much an iPod shuffle at the same time and has tons more features, and it uses a standard USB interface to get files onto it (i.e. works just like a pendrive, don't ask me what protocol that actually is), and you can use just about anything to manage it.
Don't give me crap that iTunes or whatever other piece of non-free shit is necessary in order to manage music.
I admit that when encoding with the default ffmpeg2thoera options, the quality leaves much to be desired, but I've managed to tweak those options and produce good quality videos for a reasonable footprint. The one option I played with was the "sharpness" option (-S), whatever it actually is, it *does* increase the sharpness for very little change in the filesize.
Two monopolies doesn't make it right, and the GPL-based monopoly the Stallmanistas are trying to create will be no better.
Total flamebait, and I've bitten.
To say that the GPL promotes a monopoly is just so wrong that I won't even take the time to point out why it's so wrong. Just think before you say such obvious blather. I will attack the implication of rms here, since the GPL has far extended beyond him and there are people who fundamentally disagree with a number of things rms says and still use the GPL nonetheless (e.g. Linus), because rms isn't the GPL and the GPL isn't rms.
OpenBSD, along with the FSF, is one of more vocal proponents for free drivers. Unlike the FSF, OpenBSD strongly emphasises the need for driver documentation, sometimes even preferring it to free drivers. They have criticised Intel's free video drivers in the past for obfuscation, magic numbers in the source, and making it almost impossible for anyone but Intel to hack them (I haven't seen any comment from them since Intel provided source in early 2008).
What is the situation with VIA's drivers? Do we get documentation? Why or why not? What are the challenges for providing documentation?
Now look at Thursdays, complaining about too much choice. He's ignoring the fact that every desktop distro makes a working set of default choices. Whether you use Ubuntu, Mandriva, Xandros, or whatever, you'll have a desktop environment, browser, music player, etc, etc chosen for you.
It's a little funny that you point out how there are not too many choices by pointing out how many distros you could choose from that give you different default choices.:-)
And just what does he think we're going to do about having too much choice?
This is a general theme he talks about in other places, and he keeps saying how free software is so difficult to get into, because very few things are standardised (or if you prefer, there are many different standards). He keeps comparing this to the non-free world, where there is Windows out of the box or MacOS X out of the box, and it's one way, and most people like it that one way. It's true: most people are what I call 12:00 blinkers. Remember those digital clocks on old VCRs that would blink 12:00 until you went out of your way to set the clock? And when the power went out or you unplugged it, you had to set the clock again, all for what seemed like little to not benefit? What a chore! So just leave the 12:00 blinking, and that's what most people did. No desire to make a choice that didn't seem to impact their lives in any meaningful way.
On tuesday still nothing useful. Google using linux isn't a reason for you to, sure I buy that. But it's not a reason not to either.
I read that argument a little differently. He is in fact saying that Google using Linux is a reason for you to not use Linux, because Google has very specific needs to meet than yours or your granny's (ah, yes, the proverbial granny).
Make uninstall, that's what autopackage is for. Enough said.
No. Not enough. Did you read the rest of the criticism? What about when you want to use something that isn't packaged, as often happens, because you want a newer version or simply because the one you want just isn't packaged for your distro? Then you have to muck around with make uninstall, and he's correct that that's not fun at all.
Linux is at least as good an OS as windows, the only place it really lacks is in application support. And if he wants to fix that, he should be arguing for linux, not against it.
So you disagree with the arguments he makes about nonstandardisation in free software, the problems with preferring source to binary distribution, bad UI design choices in both GNOME and KDE, problems with upgrades in Ubuntu's model (either the whole OS gets updated, or nothing at all, or only parts of it through great user strife), and so on?
In fact, I would personally argue that application support is the least of it, but that's only because I don't have the needs of all the non-free software other people need (but perhaps you do have those needs yourself). There are lots of things wrong with the way the whole free software community is designed that could use some rethinking. Those flaws have to be pointed out, not praised.
LinuxHater's blog is aweseome, and I say this as someone who deeply loves Linux and GNU and all that is based on them. His criticisms are very well thought-out, not just stupid name calling, but clear, effective, technical, and explicit complaints about everything that is wrong with free software. He coats it with sardonic and bitter vitriol, yet beneath that tough exterior, there are the complaints of someone who has evidently spent a lot of time poking around the system, down to its gritty internals, and has found everything that could be improved about it.
Even Miguel de Icaza loves LinuxHater's blog. I recommend that any free software enthusiast spend some good time reading the blog. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder how you can make it all better.
Dammit, people. The GPL is a license, not a contract. It doesn't need explicit consent from its users. It doesn't need a clickthrough. So why does this software have a clickthrough GPL? This looks to me like a very basic misunderstanding of what the GPL does. I also have some reservations about them making this software GPLv2 only, but that's a very minor thing.
BTW - there's no Ogg Frog to download yet, not even CVS or Subversion.
I know you may disagree with this, especially given your other remarks about OS vs FS, but... "release early, release often."
Out of consideration for my non-technical target market, I'm not releasing anything until it reaches it's planned 1.0 feature set, and is reasonably bug free.
This is a frequent trap. "I will not release until the code is good." I have seen this happen, many, many times! Why do I call it a trap? Because you're liable to abandon the code yourself, letting it languish for many years. You never know who might come along and make it better. And what would anyone lose from releasing early copies of the code, with a caveat emptor there?
At least for non-technical users, I feel The Cathedral is better than The Bazaar.
That's fine, but for technical users, you can tell them "if you know what svn is, you can get the code here and do whatever you want with it." Why aren't you doing so?
My guess is that it's out of pride of showing your ugly code that you aren't releasing it right away. Well, guess what: everyone's code sucks, including yours. Swallow your pride, release the code, let us reap the benefits of whatever is already there, and take the possible if admittedly perhaps unlikely benefit that your own code will get from letting other people see it.
Bullshit. If they really wanted to make sharing illegal,
Wtf? It's illegal because it's not under a free license that says "here, share this". Period. That's how copyright law currently works in the US: makes most sharing illegal by default. Whether it's DRMed or not is irrelevant. In fact, the opposite is also in some places true: in Canada it's legal by default to break DRM in order to enable certain types of sharing.
Bottom line: there is no strong correlation between DRM and legality of sharing.
And just because I buy DRM free music, you have assumed I want to share it illegally, eh? Guilt conscious much?
Your intentions are non-sequitur. Whether you want to share it or not, it's still mostly illegal unless it's under a free license.
Slashdot Mirror
They clearly meant free, not gratis. Gratis is such a weak feature of software that I don't think it deserves to share a meanin with free.
We already tried that. It failed. :-(
There's actually a good reason for irregularities... efficiency! No, really. It's clear that only common words display irregularities, new vocabulary acquisitions to a language almost always are regular (except when we are intentionally trying to be cute, like "Emacsen"). And usually, the irregularities are shorter than the regular versions.. "ate", one syllable, "eated", two. The words that get used the most are the ones that get the most irregular.
Since this is Slashdot, to put it in terms of C, "typedef eated ate;"
The hatred of politicians is well founded. Quite simply, you must lie to be a successful politician, and you must have a certain degree of cold-hearted sociopathy in order to be a good politician.
The job itself is dirty. It's very dirty. Everyone is going to try to corrupt you one way or another, sometimes legally, sometimes not. No matter what you do, you're going to piss someone off, so you need to discard some or most of your sense of empathy for your fellow humans.
And you will need to lie, sometimes, often, all the time. It's not so much the people who become politicians, it's just the job description.
It became qutecom.
The code is sitll there, but the project hasn't seen many updates recently, and development has slowed down to almost nothing. :-(
It's not a double standard. Copyleft is the opposite of copyright, just happens to use to hack existing copyright laws to achieve the desired effect.
Say defending copyleft is a double standard is like saying atheists are religious.
It's default in the sense that if you stick in the recommended Gnome default desktop and just furiously click "next" during the installation, you'll get Gnome and Tomboy.
Where did you check?
Admittedly, a free project like Netbeans doesn't have to accept contributions, but "Open Source" should mean a lot more than "you can see the source". It's confusion like the one you just expressed precisely why the "free" part of "FOSS" is also important.
Why do you use Adobe Reader in Debian? This is an honest question. I work all the time with PDFs, and I've been very happy with Evince, sometimes see what Okular is up to. Why do you need Adobe Reader? For forms?
Yes, KDE 3.5, but that's just an accident of the release cycle. KDE 4.1 has already been backported to lenny, and although there are no promises for a 4.2 backport, it is not impossible to think that they might happen, albeit admittedly unlikely.
Like my dad, with 35,000+ hours of flight accumulated before his death said... "nothing that flies is a toy".
The big notable exceptions are the projects that make contribution very easy and modular — the ones that allow a plugin architecture. Emacs, Firefox, and Compiz get lots of contributions, because if there's another feature you want, it's very easy to code it up as a plugin.
Slashdot is a bit late in reporting these news... I tried to submit them earlier when the news was fresher.
The problem at heart is that one of the biggest and evillest academic publishers, Elsevier, has been supporting a crackpot.
This shows that Elsevier isn't doing enough to promote the quality of research, and worse, libraries are paying huge fees with tax money for worthless journals. The problem here is bundling; university libraries have to buy in bundles journals, one of which may contain crackpot ideas as this one did.
Boycott Elsevier! Let's have open access already.
I had a Rio MP3 player before an iPod, it had a music manager that only worked with the Rio, and I had to switch to iTunes when I got my iPod... so what??
My current music player is a Samsung YP-U2, which was half as much an iPod shuffle at the same time and has tons more features, and it uses a standard USB interface to get files onto it (i.e. works just like a pendrive, don't ask me what protocol that actually is), and you can use just about anything to manage it.
Don't give me crap that iTunes or whatever other piece of non-free shit is necessary in order to manage music.
What exactly are those quality issues?
I admit that when encoding with the default ffmpeg2thoera options, the quality leaves much to be desired, but I've managed to tweak those options and produce good quality videos for a reasonable footprint. The one option I played with was the "sharpness" option (-S), whatever it actually is, it *does* increase the sharpness for very little change in the filesize.
Total flamebait, and I've bitten.
To say that the GPL promotes a monopoly is just so wrong that I won't even take the time to point out why it's so wrong. Just think before you say such obvious blather. I will attack the implication of rms here, since the GPL has far extended beyond him and there are people who fundamentally disagree with a number of things rms says and still use the GPL nonetheless (e.g. Linus), because rms isn't the GPL and the GPL isn't rms.
OpenBSD, along with the FSF, is one of more vocal proponents for free drivers. Unlike the FSF, OpenBSD strongly emphasises the need for driver documentation, sometimes even preferring it to free drivers. They have criticised Intel's free video drivers in the past for obfuscation, magic numbers in the source, and making it almost impossible for anyone but Intel to hack them (I haven't seen any comment from them since Intel provided source in early 2008).
What is the situation with VIA's drivers? Do we get documentation? Why or why not? What are the challenges for providing documentation?
Ack, PDF is the wrong format to use for something like that uses so much nontext information. It creates files that are too big. Which is why I took the liberty of converting it to DJVU.
It's a little funny that you point out how there are not too many choices by pointing out how many distros you could choose from that give you different default choices. :-)
This is a general theme he talks about in other places, and he keeps saying how free software is so difficult to get into, because very few things are standardised (or if you prefer, there are many different standards). He keeps comparing this to the non-free world, where there is Windows out of the box or MacOS X out of the box, and it's one way, and most people like it that one way. It's true: most people are what I call 12:00 blinkers. Remember those digital clocks on old VCRs that would blink 12:00 until you went out of your way to set the clock? And when the power went out or you unplugged it, you had to set the clock again, all for what seemed like little to not benefit? What a chore! So just leave the 12:00 blinking, and that's what most people did. No desire to make a choice that didn't seem to impact their lives in any meaningful way.
I read that argument a little differently. He is in fact saying that Google using Linux is a reason for you to not use Linux, because Google has very specific needs to meet than yours or your granny's (ah, yes, the proverbial granny).
No. Not enough. Did you read the rest of the criticism? What about when you want to use something that isn't packaged, as often happens, because you want a newer version or simply because the one you want just isn't packaged for your distro? Then you have to muck around with make uninstall, and he's correct that that's not fun at all.
So you disagree with the arguments he makes about nonstandardisation in free software, the problems with preferring source to binary distribution, bad UI design choices in both GNOME and KDE, problems with upgrades in Ubuntu's model (either the whole OS gets updated, or nothing at all, or only parts of it through great user strife), and so on?
In fact, I would personally argue that application support is the least of it, but that's only because I don't have the needs of all the non-free software other people need (but perhaps you do have those needs yourself). There are lots of things wrong with the way the whole free software community is designed that could use some rethinking. Those flaws have to be pointed out, not praised.
LinuxHater's blog is aweseome, and I say this as someone who deeply loves Linux and GNU and all that is based on them. His criticisms are very well thought-out, not just stupid name calling, but clear, effective, technical, and explicit complaints about everything that is wrong with free software. He coats it with sardonic and bitter vitriol, yet beneath that tough exterior, there are the complaints of someone who has evidently spent a lot of time poking around the system, down to its gritty internals, and has found everything that could be improved about it.
Even Miguel de Icaza loves LinuxHater's blog. I recommend that any free software enthusiast spend some good time reading the blog. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder how you can make it all better.
Dammit, people. The GPL is a license, not a contract. It doesn't need explicit consent from its users. It doesn't need a clickthrough. So why does this software have a clickthrough GPL? This looks to me like a very basic misunderstanding of what the GPL does. I also have some reservations about them making this software GPLv2 only, but that's a very minor thing.
I know you may disagree with this, especially given your other remarks about OS vs FS, but... "release early, release often."
This is a frequent trap. "I will not release until the code is good." I have seen this happen, many, many times! Why do I call it a trap? Because you're liable to abandon the code yourself, letting it languish for many years. You never know who might come along and make it better. And what would anyone lose from releasing early copies of the code, with a caveat emptor there?
That's fine, but for technical users, you can tell them "if you know what svn is, you can get the code here and do whatever you want with it." Why aren't you doing so?
My guess is that it's out of pride of showing your ugly code that you aren't releasing it right away. Well, guess what: everyone's code sucks, including yours. Swallow your pride, release the code, let us reap the benefits of whatever is already there, and take the possible if admittedly perhaps unlikely benefit that your own code will get from letting other people see it.
Np. Sorry I wasn't being clear. And yeah, there's nothing wrong with paying for music, but I'd rather pay for it under nice terms.
Bottom line: there is no strong correlation between DRM and legality of sharing.
Your intentions are non-sequitur. Whether you want to share it or not, it's still mostly illegal unless it's under a free license.
Under a CC license too?