"Dr Gatling figured that a gun that would shoot faster would mean that an army would need less soldiers to spray out the same number of buttets and therefore there would be less soldiers on the field getting killed and injured."
That was his pretext for inventing it... but why do you believe him? Even if he needed the money, you wouldn't think he'd be stupid enough to say something like "My new gun rocks! You can just mow down people like bugs! And now I've patented it, I'm gonna be RICH!"
Sure would make it uncomfortable at dinner parties if he happened to be speaking to someone who had recently lost a family member to his invention.
"You seem to imply anything closed source is not worth trusting (using?) because you cannot see the source code.. Yet I am guessing you'll blindly trust the code coming from unknown multitudes of volunteers from all over the world (who may have much more questionable goals than apple inc) just because it is "open" or "Free?".."
In between black and white, there are several colors otherwise known as "gray". There are actually multiple shades of them. Each can be compared and placed at varying distances on a continuum with white and one end, and black on the other.
When you have mastered this concept, you will understand that the choice between "using Apple" and "blindly trusting" Ubuntu is a false dichotomy.
I have no means to verify that Apple is trustworthy. It is near the bottom of the scale of trust.
A rung above that is Ubuntu with some BLOBs. At least most of it is auditable.
A rung above that is Ubuntu, because I can theoretically audit the code myself. Whether I do or not is immaterial, there are lots of eyes out there, Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro at the moment and the project has a lot to lose if there are intentional vulnerabilities in the code. As with the entire chain of command responsible for the lapse.
A rung above that is something like OpenBSD, which prioritizes continual code audits by multiple people, and sacrifices cutting edge features for security.
A rung above that is code where people I know and trust have actually audited the code.
And a rung above that is code I audit myself.
Now, the last two are out of my league financially. But a person should draw the line somewhere.
To use Apple means to trust Jobs, and everyone else at Apple, on faith. I can't see the source code. I don't know what's in there. I mean, Jobs does have a nice sense of minimalism in presentation, I'll give him that. But trust him, or everyone at Apple? Why?
And that's before you even get to issues of price. Ubuntu = free.
I am using ubuntu now. And after a week of nailing every little quirk that an install has, migrating applications, etc, it's working perfectly. Sure, it might be a lot of effort to go to. Or I could have just ordered one from Dell and got everything set up out of the box. But I'm cheap.
Either way, it's worth it to be finally using free (all senses of the word) stuff. And honestly, the top flight distros are miles ahead of what was available ten and even five years ago. Printer drivers just work. No worrying about configuring fstab, network, syntax coloring, etc. No worrying about mounting USB drives etc.
Synaptic rules. Search. Install. Done.
Linux is certainly ready for MY desktop. No Vista for me, or OSX either. And I've tried linux and given up in frustration something like 4 or 5 times before in a 10 year period.
This will continue. I will be burning liveCDs for my friends and family. After all, they are free. And I won't be changing back. If anything, I will move to OpenBSD and figure out how to make that ready for my desktop.
Every person who switches is another person who can hack some more functionality, who can write a howto to smooth the process, to generate a bug report, to advocate or spread to friends. It's a virtuous cycle.
1. Say obviously wrong and contentious stuff. 2. Generate hits from people who have an urge to correct but do not realize they are being duped. 3. Collect Ad revenue.
"You will never see a flatter set of graphs in your life. That has always seemed highly suspicious to me."
It does seem very interesting that this is the case. And it would make a good deal of sense for MS to make an under the table deal with them to limit performance under linux especially if it means that more computers are installed with Vista. It hurts a graphics card manufacturer very little to shut off linux, but it means a lot to MS to be able to cripple future competition and mindshare. Gaming rigs last a long time, even if not used by their original owners.
The point? Eventually you might have the computing power to simulate life with its own universe heat death.
Before then of course, you can issue a few POKE commands to shake the ant hill a bit. You might make burning bushes talk to people, or the virgin Mary appear in supermarket freezer window condensation.
"are all just continuing examples of the European Union seeing something that exists in the free market, is successful and, because they are American, they ipso facto need to be reproduced "by us".
Hilarious, and pathetic."
It's actually called self reliance. It's a bit of a security risk trusting both your nation's operating systems and internet searches to foreign companies, especially when you can count on so many searches going straight through NSA. There's an espionage risk in doing so, even if only industrial.
I suppose it's also hilarious and pathetic that the US government subsidizes steel and the arms industry. I suppose they should just let the Chinese produce all their steel for them, let Russia build her airplanes and if they ever act antagonistically, just draft an army of hairdressers and plumbers from your wonderful "service economy" to start building your army's infrastructure from scratch. An infrastructure that probably takes as long as most wars to build.
In this day and age, internet search is also a national security issue for any country. Trusting to the free market would be like playing an RTS where you have fog of war on, and everyone else has fog of war off.
For some reason most libertarians don't seem to understand that when they say a government should provide police, courts and military, that last one is a slippery slope. It's not just a bunch of men with guns. To fight a war you need energy security, infrastructure to produce the materiel for an army, natural resources to build the materiel, food to feed the army, and some sort of parity with the weapons of your nation's competitors including information weapons of traffic analysis, crypto, etc. So, to have an effective military you start heading down the road to a planned economy before you can even say "Milton Friedman".
"When there is nothing in the budget for the $25 print cartridge and nothing in the budget for dial-up or DSL then the $250 PC is a fifty-pound paperweight."
Meh. If all they use that PC for is to prepare documents, a $10 flash drive means they can print anything they want for $.25 a page at numerous local places, or for nothing at school.
And in the 10 years or so before I had internet, I still somehow found a use for a computer.
All that means is that they'll discover abandonware. Though perhaps by the time your kids are in college, commodity PCs will be more than capable of playing WoW.
"No, I correctly assume that most environmentalists' preferred policies would impose a greater penalty on someone who drove a Hummer once per year (since it would probably be banned), than on someone who unnecessarily drove a prius 100 miles per week, despite the formers lesser environmental impact."
Or you could just crank the gas tax. I'm sure many environmentalists would be happy with that option too.
Just as big a problem with Hummers is the lethal effect of their huge and unecessary mass in a collision with a smaller car. "Cars" of that height also cause unnecessary acceleration and braking of other cars in moderate to heavy traffic.
The fortunate thing is, many of these commodity PC buyers won't need to switch. For any school assignment, OOo works just as well as MS. Ditto tracking personal expenses, creating a résumé or job application letter, or most other mundane tasks.
That's the beginning of mindshare. And it's not something that MS can easily counter. Selling to students is a great way to do some price differentiation, and gain mindshare for future corporate purchases. They can't do that at WalMart, if they did that they might as well give Office away everywhere.
For that reason, perhaps when there is a computer on every desk and in every home... it will be running FOSS software.
"We, the consumers, already have the power to make changes, with our wallets and where we choose to shop."
That works really well... if you happen to live in Galt's Gulch.
Outside of an Ayn Rand novel, the vast bulk of people aren't intelligent or motivated enough to realize that Walmart is anything other than a big store that sells stuff cheap. They don't realize that the logical endpoint of allowing imports from countries at slave labor prices is that local businesses aren't able to compete without treating their workers exactly the same, which they aren't able to do without operating illegally.
And that's ignoring the issue of being dependent on a nation that probably doesn't have your best interests at heart.
"Probably justifiable at the time, but one of those slippery slope-type situations like Lincoln jailing journalists under the sedition act....like Gitmo..."
Anything and everything is justifiable... on the side that wins the war. Classify the truth, indoctrinate those who don't know, and kill or imprison those who know enough to throw doubt on your justification.
"But the War of the Rings doesn't have to be an allegory for World War II; Sauron's Orcish army doesn't have to be a representation of the German war machine; Gandalf is not Jesus Christ come to guide the West against the forces of evil!"
Considering that Tolkien described it as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision" to a Jesuit friend, it would seem more applicable to the incursions of Islamic forces into Europe and the eventual response to them. But yeah, it can be just a story too.
Perhaps you should say what you really think instead of hiding behind "playing devil's advocate"?
Your argument ignores differences between Arabs and Germans/Japanese, who have more of a tribal than national structure.
The Japanese civilians did not quit. Their emperor quit, with the result that the militaristic aggression of the Japanese stopped in unison (with the exception of a few living out in the jungle who did not get the message). And Germany was occupied, and the press seized by the occupiers (which was the effective mode of communication between leadership and rank and file).
To get the Iraqis to quit in unison is a lot harder. The hierarchy is a lot lower level, and thus harder to control. That's part of the reason they don't tend to do well in organized, large scale, European type battles, but do well at irregular type warfare. Easy to invade, hard to control.
There is also the question of the pretext of the war. On what grounds is the US justified in carpet bombing Iraq into submission? WMD or bringing democracy?
"Expecting a modern processor, with hugely complicated microcode, to be bug-free is like saying you could write a full-scale, bug-free operating system: the costs of doing so would be astronomical, so pretty much no-one does."
Still, both goals are worthy. Although for practical reasons, perhaps only the bug-free OS is feasible.
We live in an era of persistent internet connections, large numbers of attackers attacking computers attached to those connections, and money to be made in compromising systems. We are also seeing a diminished number of "killer apps" requiring more computing power than what is cheaply available.
It seems that the logical direction software should be moving towards is refinement. It costs nothing to replicate software. And bugs are finite.
Think of it like a car. Every model has problems, and they are usually bugs that can be fixed. A little plastic part that should have been made out of metal gets fatigue and cracks. The difference between models of cars and models of operating systems is that the design of the OS is the OS itself, whereas the design of a car is useless without a huge industrial plant necessary to build the car cheaply.
One allows a situation where the profit motive ensures that consumers are jerked around believing that their new expensive car is a great improvement, and yet it carries the same amount of people, at the same speed, wastes the same amount of energy, and has the same number of poorly designed parts that will break on you ten years down the track as the same car 50 years ago. The OS however allows a situation where something free and asymptotically approaching perfect is theoretically possible given time.
The processor situation is different again from the car industry and also the OS industry. Processors are very difficult for fashion to influence. They are unseen, have very little use for conveying status, and provide computing performance for a given power consumption and security risk. Thus although they require expensive plants to produce, they are more of a commodity. But reducing bugs will become more of a focus just as reducing power consumption has become important.
At least she can download and try every single linux and BSD distribution hosted at her ISP, for free, in the space of a day. If they offer that service.
Slashdot Mirror
"Dr Gatling figured that a gun that would shoot faster would mean that an army would need less soldiers to spray out the same number of buttets and therefore there would be less soldiers on the field getting killed and injured."
That was his pretext for inventing it... but why do you believe him? Even if he needed the money, you wouldn't think he'd be stupid enough to say something like "My new gun rocks! You can just mow down people like bugs! And now I've patented it, I'm gonna be RICH!"
Sure would make it uncomfortable at dinner parties if he happened to be speaking to someone who had recently lost a family member to his invention.
"You seem to imply anything closed source is not worth trusting (using?) because you cannot see the source code.. Yet I am guessing you'll blindly trust the code coming from unknown multitudes of volunteers from all over the world (who may have much more questionable goals than apple inc) just because it is "open" or "Free?".."
In between black and white, there are several colors otherwise known as "gray". There are actually multiple shades of them. Each can be compared and placed at varying distances on a continuum with white and one end, and black on the other.
When you have mastered this concept, you will understand that the choice between "using Apple" and "blindly trusting" Ubuntu is a false dichotomy.
I have no means to verify that Apple is trustworthy. It is near the bottom of the scale of trust.
A rung above that is Ubuntu with some BLOBs. At least most of it is auditable.
A rung above that is Ubuntu, because I can theoretically audit the code myself. Whether I do or not is immaterial, there are lots of eyes out there, Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro at the moment and the project has a lot to lose if there are intentional vulnerabilities in the code. As with the entire chain of command responsible for the lapse.
A rung above that is something like OpenBSD, which prioritizes continual code audits by multiple people, and sacrifices cutting edge features for security.
A rung above that is code where people I know and trust have actually audited the code.
And a rung above that is code I audit myself.
Now, the last two are out of my league financially. But a person should draw the line somewhere.
"Really, it's ok, we don't mind."
Awww geee! Thanks!
After they get that working they can start on cryonics.
Both scientology and the MAFIAA are businesses without scruples. But apparently Germany allows Amway and other MLM schemes in there, go figure.
To use Apple means to trust Jobs, and everyone else at Apple, on faith. I can't see the source code. I don't know what's in there. I mean, Jobs does have a nice sense of minimalism in presentation, I'll give him that. But trust him, or everyone at Apple? Why?
And that's before you even get to issues of price. Ubuntu = free.
I am using ubuntu now. And after a week of nailing every little quirk that an install has, migrating applications, etc, it's working perfectly. Sure, it might be a lot of effort to go to. Or I could have just ordered one from Dell and got everything set up out of the box. But I'm cheap.
Either way, it's worth it to be finally using free (all senses of the word) stuff. And honestly, the top flight distros are miles ahead of what was available ten and even five years ago. Printer drivers just work. No worrying about configuring fstab, network, syntax coloring, etc. No worrying about mounting USB drives etc.
Synaptic rules. Search. Install. Done.
Linux is certainly ready for MY desktop. No Vista for me, or OSX either. And I've tried linux and given up in frustration something like 4 or 5 times before in a 10 year period.
This will continue. I will be burning liveCDs for my friends and family. After all, they are free. And I won't be changing back. If anything, I will move to OpenBSD and figure out how to make that ready for my desktop.
Every person who switches is another person who can hack some more functionality, who can write a howto to smooth the process, to generate a bug report, to advocate or spread to friends. It's a virtuous cycle.
1. Say obviously wrong and contentious stuff.
2. Generate hits from people who have an urge to correct but do not realize they are being duped.
3. Collect Ad revenue.
No ??? anywhere in sight.
"You will never see a flatter set of graphs in your life. That has always seemed highly suspicious to me."
It does seem very interesting that this is the case. And it would make a good deal of sense for MS to make an under the table deal with them to limit performance under linux especially if it means that more computers are installed with Vista. It hurts a graphics card manufacturer very little to shut off linux, but it means a lot to MS to be able to cripple future competition and mindshare. Gaming rigs last a long time, even if not used by their original owners.
The point? Eventually you might have the computing power to simulate life with its own universe heat death.
Before then of course, you can issue a few POKE commands to shake the ant hill a bit. You might make burning bushes talk to people, or the virgin Mary appear in supermarket freezer window condensation.
Beats playing solitaire to pass the time.
"are all just continuing examples of the European Union seeing something that exists in the free market, is successful and, because they are American, they ipso facto need to be reproduced "by us".
Hilarious, and pathetic."
It's actually called self reliance. It's a bit of a security risk trusting both your nation's operating systems and internet searches to foreign companies, especially when you can count on so many searches going straight through NSA. There's an espionage risk in doing so, even if only industrial.
I suppose it's also hilarious and pathetic that the US government subsidizes steel and the arms industry. I suppose they should just let the Chinese produce all their steel for them, let Russia build her airplanes and if they ever act antagonistically, just draft an army of hairdressers and plumbers from your wonderful "service economy" to start building your army's infrastructure from scratch. An infrastructure that probably takes as long as most wars to build.
In this day and age, internet search is also a national security issue for any country. Trusting to the free market would be like playing an RTS where you have fog of war on, and everyone else has fog of war off.
For some reason most libertarians don't seem to understand that when they say a government should provide police, courts and military, that last one is a slippery slope. It's not just a bunch of men with guns. To fight a war you need energy security, infrastructure to produce the materiel for an army, natural resources to build the materiel, food to feed the army, and some sort of parity with the weapons of your nation's competitors including information weapons of traffic analysis, crypto, etc. So, to have an effective military you start heading down the road to a planned economy before you can even say "Milton Friedman".
If you are caught downloading copyrighted material...
"I don't need to see all your pretty java crap, and a good site doesn't rely on java to display correctly anyway."
Hell yes. If web 2.0 means accepting malware by default, I'll be perfectly happy with Web 1.0 thank-you-very-much.
You may not have anything to hide, but using if you are using the same password on multiple sites its as good an identifier as using the same login.
"When there is nothing in the budget for the $25 print cartridge and nothing in the budget for dial-up or DSL then the $250 PC is a fifty-pound paperweight."
Meh. If all they use that PC for is to prepare documents, a $10 flash drive means they can print anything they want for $.25 a page at numerous local places, or for nothing at school.
And in the 10 years or so before I had internet, I still somehow found a use for a computer.
All that means is that they'll discover abandonware. Though perhaps by the time your kids are in college, commodity PCs will be more than capable of playing WoW.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
"No, I correctly assume that most environmentalists' preferred policies would impose a greater penalty on someone who drove a Hummer once per year (since it would probably be banned), than on someone who unnecessarily drove a prius 100 miles per week, despite the formers lesser environmental impact."
Or you could just crank the gas tax. I'm sure many environmentalists would be happy with that option too.
Just as big a problem with Hummers is the lethal effect of their huge and unecessary mass in a collision with a smaller car. "Cars" of that height also cause unnecessary acceleration and braking of other cars in moderate to heavy traffic.
The fortunate thing is, many of these commodity PC buyers won't need to switch. For any school assignment, OOo works just as well as MS. Ditto tracking personal expenses, creating a résumé or job application letter, or most other mundane tasks.
That's the beginning of mindshare. And it's not something that MS can easily counter. Selling to students is a great way to do some price differentiation, and gain mindshare for future corporate purchases. They can't do that at WalMart, if they did that they might as well give Office away everywhere.
For that reason, perhaps when there is a computer on every desk and in every home... it will be running FOSS software.
"We, the consumers, already have the power to make changes, with our wallets and where we choose to shop."
That works really well... if you happen to live in Galt's Gulch.
Outside of an Ayn Rand novel, the vast bulk of people aren't intelligent or motivated enough to realize that Walmart is anything other than a big store that sells stuff cheap. They don't realize that the logical endpoint of allowing imports from countries at slave labor prices is that local businesses aren't able to compete without treating their workers exactly the same, which they aren't able to do without operating illegally.
And that's ignoring the issue of being dependent on a nation that probably doesn't have your best interests at heart.
"Probably justifiable at the time, but one of those slippery slope-type situations like Lincoln jailing journalists under the sedition act....like Gitmo..."
Anything and everything is justifiable... on the side that wins the war. Classify the truth, indoctrinate those who don't know, and kill or imprison those who know enough to throw doubt on your justification.
If you check the MD5 hashes, why would it be a problem?
"But the War of the Rings doesn't have to be an allegory for World War II; Sauron's Orcish army doesn't have to be a representation of the German war machine; Gandalf is not Jesus Christ come to guide the West against the forces of evil!"
Considering that Tolkien described it as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision" to a Jesuit friend, it would seem more applicable to the incursions of Islamic forces into Europe and the eventual response to them. But yeah, it can be just a story too.
Perhaps you should say what you really think instead of hiding behind "playing devil's advocate"?
Your argument ignores differences between Arabs and Germans/Japanese, who have more of a tribal than national structure.
The Japanese civilians did not quit. Their emperor quit, with the result that the militaristic aggression of the Japanese stopped in unison (with the exception of a few living out in the jungle who did not get the message). And Germany was occupied, and the press seized by the occupiers (which was the effective mode of communication between leadership and rank and file).
To get the Iraqis to quit in unison is a lot harder. The hierarchy is a lot lower level, and thus harder to control. That's part of the reason they don't tend to do well in organized, large scale, European type battles, but do well at irregular type warfare. Easy to invade, hard to control.
There is also the question of the pretext of the war. On what grounds is the US justified in carpet bombing Iraq into submission? WMD or bringing democracy?
"Expecting a modern processor, with hugely complicated microcode, to be bug-free is like saying you could write a full-scale, bug-free operating system: the costs of doing so would be astronomical, so pretty much no-one does."
Still, both goals are worthy. Although for practical reasons, perhaps only the bug-free OS is feasible.
We live in an era of persistent internet connections, large numbers of attackers attacking computers attached to those connections, and money to be made in compromising systems. We are also seeing a diminished number of "killer apps" requiring more computing power than what is cheaply available.
It seems that the logical direction software should be moving towards is refinement. It costs nothing to replicate software. And bugs are finite.
Think of it like a car. Every model has problems, and they are usually bugs that can be fixed. A little plastic part that should have been made out of metal gets fatigue and cracks. The difference between models of cars and models of operating systems is that the design of the OS is the OS itself, whereas the design of a car is useless without a huge industrial plant necessary to build the car cheaply.
One allows a situation where the profit motive ensures that consumers are jerked around believing that their new expensive car is a great improvement, and yet it carries the same amount of people, at the same speed, wastes the same amount of energy, and has the same number of poorly designed parts that will break on you ten years down the track as the same car 50 years ago. The OS however allows a situation where something free and asymptotically approaching perfect is theoretically possible given time.
The processor situation is different again from the car industry and also the OS industry. Processors are very difficult for fashion to influence. They are unseen, have very little use for conveying status, and provide computing performance for a given power consumption and security risk. Thus although they require expensive plants to produce, they are more of a commodity. But reducing bugs will become more of a focus just as reducing power consumption has become important.
At least she can download and try every single linux and BSD distribution hosted at her ISP, for free, in the space of a day. If they offer that service.