It's not like AOLers contribute anything useful to the internet anyways
What an amazing misconception.
Its easy to say they contribute nothing. But in fact, they contribute one important thing. Its not good Usenet
posts, insightful email, strong opinions, or useful chat.
They, do, however, subsidize the rest of us. Think of it like this.
Plus, like Microsoft, they provide a focal point for geeks everywhere to unleash their fury. Without that, the internet would implode as millions of geeks' heads exploded in frustration.
I'm not sure what your needs on the windows side are, but the company I work for (www.netraverse.com) has a product called Win4Lin that will allow you to run most office-related Windows applications at near-native speeds on Linux, and there has been some effort put into making it work on a NetVista. If you would like more information you can email me at msouth@netraverse.com and I can put you in touch with the guy that did the work.
The product works really well, and you can run it in full-screen mode so that it looks just like you are sitting at a windows box.
bummer--and I had mod points today, too. Switched to PostgreSQL for my last few projects--the views and sub-selects alone are a godsend! Thanks for a great project.
Although accepting a marriage proposal from a Slashdot AC is the sort of thing I am likely to have on my to-do list, this one is complicated because I am neither female nor single. But I appreciate the sentiment.
But anyway, thanks for putting up the "what do you put in a toaster?" thing, I couldn't remember what the setup was for it.
Isn't there a single Mac user in the USPTO? At least in the Mac community, it is well knows that Steve Jobs invented the RDF. See http://www.appleturns.com/scene/?id=96
The rationale for requiring it to be put in the public domain (or BSD, whatever) is that, even though _you feel_ that it should all be GPL, other people, who also pay taxes, and therefore also supported the development, do not.
For example, some kid with a great idea for an improvement on public-fundingly-developed technology X and wants to make a business out of it ought to get the same change to make a proprietary addition to the public domain code and run it as a business as the GPL crowd gets to try to put improvements under a freedom-guaranteeing license. Why should the GPL people get favored treatmant? If the code that the public funds goes into the public domain, everyone gets an equal shot at pressing their business plan/ideology/whatever.
It doesn't prevent people from making additions to the code and putting their additions under the GPL. It doesn't prevent some random individual from making proprietary additions and charging for his work. (He won't be able to make trivial changes and lock everyone out--everyone already has exactly the same starting point that he had, and if all he did was add a couple lines then anyone else could do the same. If he did do something really great, he ought to have the option of charging for his work, which he could not realstically do if the code was only available to him under the GPL.)
One more important point--at the moment, the law is bad in both your eyes and mine--nobody gets anything unless the grantee happens to be generous. So, even if you would prefer the GPL, there is an advantage to you to support putting it in the public domain, because at least then you would be able to get it and make GPL'd additions.
Thanks--if mod points were transferable, I would give you the ones from mine (your post's parent).
[ot] Re:There's a good chance it's fake...
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
I'll eat my hockey puck mouse. I'm not using it anyhow.
Wow, I've heard of embedded systems before, but I'm thinking that a hockey puck that requires a mouse to interface with it is just a little bit unnecessarily complex.
On the other hand, I like the idea of using a hockey stick to interface with my machine some times, so maybe this is just a case of someone doing it for the symmetry.
I have posted this elsewhere on this article, sorry for the redundancy. I used to think that all govt funded work should be released under GPL, but I eventually realized that "taxpayers" include "people that want to be able to make money on software", so it seems to me that the only way really be fair is to put it in the public domain and then let everyone develop from there. There is no reason to favor GPL'ers over BSD'ers at the regulatory level. The tax money comes from everyone, so everyone should have equal access to the results to use as they wish. I wrote this up in the debate on siliconvalley.com with Mundie and Perens. I saved a copy here:
http://www.fulcrum.org/features/public_domain.ht ml
There was also another, less well known side effect. The people in charge at NCSA felt really dumb for letting this thing walk out of there without making bazillions on it. They were not about to let it happen again. So, following this, everything that got started was looked at as being a possible "next Mosaic"--and if you wanted to get involved in it there were all kinds of license agreements and restrictions on it, etc. Or so a friend of mine that used to work there said. This had a severe chilling effect on possible collaboration, and a lot of good ideas probably dried up as a result of it.
What's ironic about it is how much better it proably would have worked for them if, instead of attempting to license it as a proprietary thing, they had opensourced it and kept the project's home/leadership there. Then a splash scree/title bar saying "NCSA Mosaic" would be in the face of nearly every computer user in the world right now, instead of a fading memory in the minds of some tiny fraction of that.
Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code.
Can you back this up? I am not sure why it was in the same paragraph with:
The Mach
kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one
of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed
with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.
In this case, you have a person who realized that decided he should license things this way, and did so. I think that, when it happens, this is why.
I have worked on various projects that were funded by your tax money, and they are now being sold as proprietary software. In that case, the person who got the grant did not decide to put it out as open source. I also do not have numbers to back myself up, but I am guessing that the vast majority of government contracts do not require the source code to be released under a BSD type license.
I wrote something about this on the siliconvalley.com debate with Mundie et al:
Re:Re killing the newton...
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
well, clearly you followed it more closely than I did. thanks for the clarification. I had completely forgotten about the spinoff/reabsorption, so I'm clearly not the one to ask:).
At one point I heard that that Jobs took an eMate home and fell in love with it. My recollection of this rumor was that it had something to do with one of the seemingly inexplicable moves. However, for all I know this is out of sync with the actual timeline as well. Have you heard this one?
Re killing the newton...
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
I don't know if its a fake or not, but Apple's got to feel stupid for discontinuing the Newton right
before Palm did so well (considering Palm wrote Graffiti for the Newton at the time).
I know it looks like this. Nobody that had a Newton could believe it, either. I have an eMate, and it's painful to look at it and think that it never got a chance, because it is one incredibe machine.
But one day I talked to a buddy of mine that interned for Apple. He heard that when Fred Anderson (I think that's the guy) came on as CFO, he found out (after he signed on) that Apple had one month's worth of cash in the bank. THe Newton project bled cash, by all accounts. I don't think there was much of a choice. I think the reason they didn't sell it cheap was because they did believe in it so strongly, but that's just a random opinion (as opposed to the other, which is a good, solid, second-hand rumor).
[ot] Re:It's a fake and here is why
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
lol, nice one.
Re:There's a good chance it's fake...
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The following morning, after Jobs announced it at MacWorld, the site went down temporarily and
then permanently not long after. Oh well!
Geez, what do you expect? He's going to be in any kind of shape to keep a website running after eating a mouse? Even a translucent cute one? And just what would he be using to update his website?
That guy is probably sitting there right now, integrity intact, mouse in digestive system, with no way to interact with his iMac. You should be honoring him, not flaming him.
Yeah, I agree tht Mozilla is in a much better position to be relevant and in widespread use than probably anything else that runs on the Linux desktop.
But still, the stuff people do at work is pretty mundane, and that's a big part of the desktop market.
I would still say that there's hope for some corporate migration as the office suites continue to improve. Maybe when the first round of XP licenses begin to expire or something. For them, multimedia capabilities are not tremendously relevant.
Maybe you use hee-haw recognition?
Well, not yet, but IMB ViaBray is supposed to be out any time now.
I wasn't criticizing Mozilla's progress. You said (in your sig) that Mozilla is the furture, but you were arguing (in your post) that Linux on the desktop was not the future. I thought that the combination of optimism and pessimism was amusing.
Following that I posed the question that underlay what I thought was funny.
Moz's capabilites will grow as needed.
I agree, but you don't think the other linux desktop apps will (or so I got te impression from your post), and I wonder why you think one will grow as needed and the other won't.
I don't think anyone will ever want to watch DVDs or
whatever in their web browser,
I don't know why not, necessarily. But the ability to read and display the formats is related to being able to edit and save them, and if these multimedia thingies matter, then people will probably be using them on the web, and the browser will need to understand them. If "Mozilla is the future", it will be need to keep up with multimedia content. And that's not so colossally far a step from having video editing.
dumb ass.
LOL. indeed. good thing that my hoof-sized keyboard doesn't require opposable thumbs, or I wouldn't be able to communicate much at all. Not that it appears I'm having any success as is.
Hey moderators, read the parent's sig, and mod it up as funny!
(Ok, that was more or less just humor, but, seriously, how is Mozilla going to be the future (that was the sig when I read this post, anyway) when all this multimedia stuff is so important? Is Mozilla going to be able to handle it? Then why won't other open source apps be able to handle it? Serious question, not a flame. (I have an iMac, and I don't look for any applications like iMovie to be coming out for Linux any time soon, but if desktop video is ever really that important, I think the open source world will find a way to support it. Yes, it's possibly an order of magnitude harder than word processing, but we have an order of magnitude more contributors...I don't know, I'm just guessing.)
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, like Microsoft, they provide a focal point for geeks everywhere to unleash their fury. Without that, the internet would implode as millions of geeks' heads exploded in frustration.
Not that they would miss us.
"Educating people about the political issues surrounding proprietary document formats isn't always appropriate in a business situation."
Heh. Let's just use this as a "true statement generator":
"[insert randomly chosen advice from RMS] isn't always appropriate in a business situation."
I think we're on pretty safe ground.
...just tell her it was named after her
I'm not sure what your needs on the windows side are, but the company I work for (www.netraverse.com) has a product called Win4Lin that will allow you to run most office-related Windows applications at near-native speeds on Linux, and there has been some effort put into making it work on a NetVista. If you would like more information you can email me at msouth@netraverse.com and I can put you in touch with the guy that did the work.
The product works really well, and you can run it in full-screen mode so that it looks just like you are sitting at a windows box.
bummer--and I had mod points today, too. Switched to PostgreSQL for my last few projects--the views and sub-selects alone are a godsend! Thanks for a great project.
mike
Although accepting a marriage proposal from a Slashdot AC is the sort of thing I am likely to have on my to-do list, this one is complicated because I am neither female nor single. But I appreciate the sentiment.
But anyway, thanks for putting up the "what do you put in a toaster?" thing, I couldn't remember what the setup was for it.
Isn't there a single Mac user in the USPTO? At least in the Mac community, it is well knows that Steve Jobs invented the RDF. See http://www.appleturns.com/scene/?id=96
The rationale for requiring it to be put in the public domain (or BSD, whatever) is that, even though _you feel_ that it should all be GPL, other people, who also pay taxes, and therefore also supported the development, do not.
For example, some kid with a great idea for an improvement on public-fundingly-developed technology X and wants to make a business out of it ought to get the same change to make a proprietary addition to the public domain code and run it as a business as the GPL crowd gets to try to put improvements under a freedom-guaranteeing license. Why should the GPL people get favored treatmant? If the code that the public funds goes into the public domain, everyone gets an equal shot at pressing their business plan/ideology/whatever.
It doesn't prevent people from making additions to the code and putting their additions under the GPL. It doesn't prevent some random individual from making proprietary additions and charging for his work. (He won't be able to make trivial changes and lock everyone out--everyone already has exactly the same starting point that he had, and if all he did was add a couple lines then anyone else could do the same. If he did do something really great, he ought to have the option of charging for his work, which he could not realstically do if the code was only available to him under the GPL.)
One more important point--at the moment, the law is bad in both your eyes and mine--nobody gets anything unless the grantee happens to be generous. So, even if you would prefer the GPL, there is an advantage to you to support putting it in the public domain, because at least then you would be able to get it and make GPL'd additions.
...but I did imagine several lawyers all jostling each other as they peered into a camera connected to a computer.
Thanks--if mod points were transferable, I would give you the ones from mine (your post's parent).
Wow, I've heard of embedded systems before, but I'm thinking that a hockey puck that requires a mouse to interface with it is just a little bit unnecessarily complex.
On the other hand, I like the idea of using a hockey stick to interface with my machine some times, so maybe this is just a case of someone doing it for the symmetry.
well, being a lot smarter than you, I would put bread in my GameQube...
Ok, I was fine up to there, but this next part seriously weakens your argument:
, if it wasn't there, I wouldn't be writing this and you would not be reading it either.
I think both of those points are an argument against it...
I have posted this elsewhere on this article, sorry for the redundancy. I used to think that all govt funded work should be released under GPL, but I eventually realized that "taxpayers" include "people that want to be able to make money on software", so it seems to me that the only way really be fair is to put it in the public domain and then let everyone develop from there. There is no reason to favor GPL'ers over BSD'ers at the regulatory level. The tax money comes from everyone, so everyone should have equal access to the results to use as they wish. I wrote this up in the debate on siliconvalley.com with Mundie and Perens. I saved a copy here:
t ml
http://www.fulcrum.org/features/public_domain.h
There was also another, less well known side effect. The people in charge at NCSA felt really dumb for letting this thing walk out of there without making bazillions on it. They were not about to let it happen again. So, following this, everything that got started was looked at as being a possible "next Mosaic"--and if you wanted to get involved in it there were all kinds of license agreements and restrictions on it, etc. Or so a friend of mine that used to work there said. This had a severe chilling effect on possible collaboration, and a lot of good ideas probably dried up as a result of it.
What's ironic about it is how much better it proably would have worked for them if, instead of attempting to license it as a proprietary thing, they had opensourced it and kept the project's home/leadership there. Then a splash scree/title bar saying "NCSA Mosaic" would be in the face of nearly every computer user in the world right now, instead of a fading memory in the minds of some tiny fraction of that.
Or something like that.
Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code.
Can you back this up? I am not sure why it was in the same paragraph with:
The Mach kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.
In this case, you have a person who realized that decided he should license things this way, and did so. I think that, when it happens, this is why.
I have worked on various projects that were funded by your tax money, and they are now being sold as proprietary software. In that case, the person who got the grant did not decide to put it out as open source. I also do not have numbers to back myself up, but I am guessing that the vast majority of government contracts do not require the source code to be released under a BSD type license.
I wrote something about this on the siliconvalley.com debate with Mundie et al:
http://www.fulcrum.org/features/public_domain.html
well, clearly you followed it more closely than I did. thanks for the clarification. I had completely forgotten about the spinoff/reabsorption, so I'm clearly not the one to ask :).
At one point I heard that that Jobs took an eMate home and fell in love with it. My recollection of this rumor was that it had something to do with one of the seemingly inexplicable moves. However, for all I know this is out of sync with the actual timeline as well. Have you heard this one?
I know it looks like this. Nobody that had a Newton could believe it, either. I have an eMate, and it's painful to look at it and think that it never got a chance, because it is one incredibe machine.
But one day I talked to a buddy of mine that interned for Apple. He heard that when Fred Anderson (I think that's the guy) came on as CFO, he found out (after he signed on) that Apple had one month's worth of cash in the bank. THe Newton project bled cash, by all accounts. I don't think there was much of a choice. I think the reason they didn't sell it cheap was because they did believe in it so strongly, but that's just a random opinion (as opposed to the other, which is a good, solid, second-hand rumor).
lol, nice one.
Geez, what do you expect? He's going to be in any kind of shape to keep a website running after eating a mouse? Even a translucent cute one? And just what would he be using to update his website?
That guy is probably sitting there right now, integrity intact, mouse in digestive system, with no way to interact with his iMac. You should be honoring him, not flaming him.
you left out "techies who need a wrench in their heads"
But still, the stuff people do at work is pretty mundane, and that's a big part of the desktop market.
I would still say that there's hope for some corporate migration as the office suites continue to improve. Maybe when the first round of XP licenses begin to expire or something. For them, multimedia capabilities are not tremendously relevant.
Well, not yet, but IMB ViaBray is supposed to be out any time now.Following that I posed the question that underlay what I thought was funny.
I agree, but you don't think the other linux desktop apps will (or so I got te impression from your post), and I wonder why you think one will grow as needed and the other won't.
I don't know why not, necessarily. But the ability to read and display the formats is related to being able to edit and save them, and if these multimedia thingies matter, then people will probably be using them on the web, and the browser will need to understand them. If "Mozilla is the future", it will be need to keep up with multimedia content. And that's not so colossally far a step from having video editing. LOL. indeed. good thing that my hoof-sized keyboard doesn't require opposable thumbs, or I wouldn't be able to communicate much at all. Not that it appears I'm having any success as is.Hey,
:).
just wanted to thank you for saying this. I think it every time this comes up, and that's a lot. Now I can just post a link to this comment
mike
Hey moderators, read the parent's sig, and mod it up as funny!
(Ok, that was more or less just humor, but, seriously, how is Mozilla going to be the future (that was the sig when I read this post, anyway) when all this multimedia stuff is so important? Is Mozilla going to be able to handle it? Then why won't other open source apps be able to handle it? Serious question, not a flame. (I have an iMac, and I don't look for any applications like iMovie to be coming out for Linux any time soon, but if desktop video is ever really that important, I think the open source world will find a way to support it. Yes, it's possibly an order of magnitude harder than word processing, but we have an order of magnitude more contributors...I don't know, I'm just guessing.)