I was thinking of buying a laptop some weeks ago but I was reluctant to use Vista. That was the initial thought that led me to buy a MacBook.
I use Windows XP at home and OpenBSD at work as desktop OS. I can't stand Linux as a desktop OS. Mac OS X seems like a perfect merge of a great GUI and the power of UNIX, running on solid, proven Intel hardware. With a Mac I have the best of both worlds.
They've already made the mistake of not allowing open source software on the iPhone (one of the many reasons I don't get one)
Are you being sarcastic? Nowadays it's difficult to say. I have just finished to watch Steve Jobs' keynote about the brand new iPhone SDK, which is a heck of a platform for development, either proprietary or open source, and the App Store that will let you distribute your application to every iPhone on Earth.
I'm not sure what's wrong with those Mac bashers around. You know, just stating to not want to be a "Mac fan" because you like tactile response is stupid for itself. Intel based Macs running UNIX plus open source software and a great set of development tools is anything a geek that respects him/herself wants to get his/her hands on.
And before anybody mods me down, I'm not a Mac fanboy. I've been programming for Windows, Unix and Unix-likes (Linux, OpenBSD) on Intel and SPARC for years and never owned a Mac until recently (two weeks ago aprox.) and I'm amazed. I'm currently writing this message from Safari while whatching my terminals (cloning repositories, building software, the usual stuff.)
You may say whatever you want about Mexican politicians, but after several years of electoral frauds we have come with a system that is practically fraud-proof.
There's nothing more secure than counting each and every vote, one by one, by hand. Any electronic system and sufficiently complex mechanical ones may be bent without anyone noticing it.
In Mexico, representatives of each candidate are present when every vote is counted. You can be sure that your vote is counted because there's a supporter of your candidate counting the votes.
Of course, in a country with more than 40 million people in poverty, there's almost nothing you can't buy. But I'm sure the USA can do a lot better than that.
Slim got rich by getting the government to hand him a telecom monopoly that allowed him to hold Mexicans by the balls and thereby extract monopoly rents
The telephone service was crappy when Carlos Slim took the company. It has made A LOT of improvements since then and has made A LOT for enabling Mexicans to get on the Internet. Not to mention his altruism.
I would welcome more "monopolies" like that if it were one, but he's actually competing with new companies that obviously have a disadvantage for being newcomers. But that's it.
"[...] look, see those birds? At some point a program was written to govern them. A program was written to watch over the trees, and the wind, the sunrise, and sunset." - The Oracle.
Probably not a program as we know it, but maybe a spirit that governs the swarms.
Mexico has approved a reform to the current electoral legislation which does something similar.
The last presidential elections were so full of spots on TV that were more about bad mouthing the competitor than proposing solutions. A lot of money had to be raised and compromises were made by the competitors for sure.
The winner is the one who has the deepest wallet.
From now on, candidates can use only the government's paid time on TV.
The media is going crazy of course because they won't get a lot of money any more for the spots, and they're masquerading this worry as a "free speech" violation (because they won't be able editorialize the campaign coverage in any form)
It's not a coincidence that Dong Nguyen Huu has said that the Mexican electoral system is one of the most advanced in the world. Let's see how it goes.
Certainly, each culture can and has named lands as they wish. My point in citing an Spanish source is because the other poster said that the name was '"THE Americas" [...] since explorers started coming.', which is false, because the first explorers in 1492 were Spanish and they named the continent America. It's all explained in that article. It explains also how the name "Americas" born.
I know English speakers differentiate North and South America, and I don't have a problem with that. We, in the Spanish world, do the same, but thinking of them as "subcontinents", for convenience probably.
But claiming that 'there is no continent of "America"" and shouting "ignorant" at you if you think otherwise is, at best, an overreaction.
As for Europe, Asia and Africa, you might have a point, if it weren't that the first explorers just called the whole land "America". That's it. Call it "historic reasons".
First of all, if you are right, there's no need to shout. Unless you have a serious personality issue... or are probably a kid.
I see you like to back up your arguments with Wikipedia. Fine. Here's mine: América
América es un continente que se extiende en gran parte del Hemisferio Occidental de la Tierra."
and about the confusion in the anglo-world:
Por otra parte, el hecho de que Inglaterra sólo colonizara unas porciones de América (a diferencia de España que dominó una gran parte del continente), así como las diferencias culturales y étnicas entre sus habitantes en el norte y el sur, contribuyó a una visión segmentaria de América entre los angloparlantes, que fueron desarrollando la idea de que ésta era un "conjunto de tierras" en lugar de un sólo continente como se entiende en castellano.
As for your tip, you're right, it's "THE Americas" and has been since explorers started coming here.
Wrong. As you can read from the article, it was América. Until England and its colonies came to América and messed up the naming.
You better go code something, help someone, have fun, angloamerican, instead of defending the undefendable. The proud for your country is untouched.
Assuming you're from the USA, let me inform you that 25% of your population is "hispanic" as you called them. Guess what will happen when the next generation arrives.
There's no need to be defensive about the "America" term. Get your facts right. America is a continent, the continent your country was named after.
You're implying it for me in your reply, when you talk about "North" and "South" America. Here's an exercise for you: get North, South and Central America, put them together and tell me what do you get (tip: no, it's not "Americas")
Alternatively, since most of America speaks a latin derived language (except the USA and Anglo-Canada), we might start using Angloamerica for the exceptions.
As you already said, you don't have to buy a Qt commercial license to develop Qt commercial software, if you abide by the GPL (you have to make your changes available when distributing), which is a good thing, isn't it? There is your freedom.
I'm sure we agree that if your interest is on developing commercial closed source software then you don't care about freedom (FSF definition). Not wanting to pay for developing Qt closed source software speaks more about a cheap person than a person caring about freedom.
Being said that, I'm not a GPL fan. I use BSD for my projects.
As you may already know, every situation has its requirements; some require fast execution, others require fast prototyping, etc. My point: judging a language merit only by its execution speed is not smart.
I have come to Ruby after learning BASIC, C, C++, PHP and Perl, in that order. Ruby seems to me like an step further in my evolution as programmer. If I want execution speed, I use C. If I want development speed, I use Ruby.
Being said that, I'm really curious about the languages you mentioned. Learning Ruby helped me to widen my view about programming and languages, because Ruby itself is an hybrid of concepts taken from other languages like LISP, Smalltalk and Perl. I've _played_ with Lua, Smalltalk and Common Lisp. Haskell is in my to-do list.
I still prefer Ruby because it has all the features from those languages (all the features that I care of) and a syntax that is familiar to me, plus the amount of libraries available.
By the way, execution speed is being targeted in Ruby 2.0 (as you may already know) with YARV.
I see your point and I agree with you. GPLed projects are not exception to "make all software better".
Yes, I do believe that companies make contributions back to BSD code, as you and anybody else can verify. And it's a fact that BSD code can't reuse already GPLed code.
There shouldn't be any angry or sad faces, certainly. I would need to brandish an ethical or moral argument for that, on which you may or may not agree:
Why a GPL project would relicense a BSD code, in the knowledge that BSD code would not be able to get modifications back, instead of contributing to the same BSD project, under the light that both, the GPL and BSD project (free software both), would benefit from it?
Yes, it's permitted, it's legal, it is allowed by the license and any BSD coder knows it in advance, before choosing the BSD license. But it is not understandable, being the GPL project a "brother" free software project, that their developers wouldn't want to cooperate on a mutual beneficial project, started by the BSD developers.
To you and the GP I answer: if that would be your goal, you wouldn't use a license that allows those 'using' your code to pervert it for their own purposes making it defacto abuse!
(emphasis mine)
BSD guys are fine if anybody uses their code for any purposes, ergo there can't be any pervertion or abuse.
The only requirement is to give attribution, respecting the copyright. And that's where Jiry and Nick failed. Ok, they have already restored the license and copyright, but now they're putting their names as copyright holders when they haven't made any substantial changes to the original work.
In other words: even if you give all your world class super-duper code, there will be companies that won't use that code to make their own code better but only to create a 'look-a-like', then extend the code with their own incompatible and all too oft bad additions, then release it as if it were superior to the original and locking the market in or polluting the brand of the original.
In that scenario, the license is irrelevant. If those companies can't use your code because e.g. it is GPLed, they would write their own from scratch (if your software is that good that they are so eagger to replicate its functionality.) It's funny; that's what the FSF has been doing for a long time by the way.
Again, in that scenario, it would be better (from a BSD point of view) that these companies use that world class super-duper code, because this modified code, even if proprietary, extended, whatever, would be better than the code they would have written from scratch.
I know, it sounds naive at best (from a GPL point of view), that's why we can't understand each other.
Let's put it in a more "violent" way: if companies like Microsoft start selling high quality software for using high quality BSD code... Great! Good for them. That's the goal: make all software better.
I know, it's mind-boggling for an FSF/GNU supporter. I'm not pretending to change anybody's mind.
You both have illustrated perfectly the difference between GPL and BSD.
GPL guys want all software to be free. BSD guys want all software to be better.
That's why we can't understand each other. The parent states that Microsoft would have a better product, and that's great from a BSD point of view. And you see a threat if Microsoft has a better product which is not free.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking of buying a laptop some weeks ago but I was reluctant to use Vista. That was the initial thought that led me to buy a MacBook.
I use Windows XP at home and OpenBSD at work as desktop OS. I can't stand Linux as a desktop OS. Mac OS X seems like a perfect merge of a great GUI and the power of UNIX, running on solid, proven Intel hardware. With a Mac I have the best of both worlds.
Are you being sarcastic? Nowadays it's difficult to say. I have just finished to watch Steve Jobs' keynote about the brand new iPhone SDK, which is a heck of a platform for development, either proprietary or open source, and the App Store that will let you distribute your application to every iPhone on Earth.
I'm not sure what's wrong with those Mac bashers around. You know, just stating to not want to be a "Mac fan" because you like tactile response is stupid for itself. Intel based Macs running UNIX plus open source software and a great set of development tools is anything a geek that respects him/herself wants to get his/her hands on.
And before anybody mods me down, I'm not a Mac fanboy. I've been programming for Windows, Unix and Unix-likes (Linux, OpenBSD) on Intel and SPARC for years and never owned a Mac until recently (two weeks ago aprox.) and I'm amazed. I'm currently writing this message from Safari while whatching my terminals (cloning repositories, building software, the usual stuff.)
Only if you have problems reading English. That sentence clearly speaks about development, not deployment.
You may say whatever you want about Mexican politicians, but after several years of electoral frauds we have come with a system that is practically fraud-proof.
There's nothing more secure than counting each and every vote, one by one, by hand. Any electronic system and sufficiently complex mechanical ones may be bent without anyone noticing it.
In Mexico, representatives of each candidate are present when every vote is counted. You can be sure that your vote is counted because there's a supporter of your candidate counting the votes.
Of course, in a country with more than 40 million people in poverty, there's almost nothing you can't buy. But I'm sure the USA can do a lot better than that.
The telephone service was crappy when Carlos Slim took the company. It has made A LOT of improvements since then and has made A LOT for enabling Mexicans to get on the Internet. Not to mention his altruism.
I would welcome more "monopolies" like that if it were one, but he's actually competing with new companies that obviously have a disadvantage for being newcomers. But that's it.
"[...] look, see those birds? At some point a program was written to govern them. A program was written to watch over the trees, and the wind, the sunrise, and sunset." - The Oracle.
Probably not a program as we know it, but maybe a spirit that governs the swarms.
It's funny. Laugh.
For those of us who aren't omnipotent, who is this guy?
You mean omniscient. He's a journalist that was in SCO's side.
Mexico has approved a reform to the current electoral legislation which does something similar.
The last presidential elections were so full of spots on TV that were more about bad mouthing the competitor than proposing solutions. A lot of money had to be raised and compromises were made by the competitors for sure.
The winner is the one who has the deepest wallet.
From now on, candidates can use only the government's paid time on TV.
The media is going crazy of course because they won't get a lot of money any more for the spots, and they're masquerading this worry as a "free speech" violation (because they won't be able editorialize the campaign coverage in any form)
It's not a coincidence that Dong Nguyen Huu has said that the Mexican electoral system is one of the most advanced in the world. Let's see how it goes.
Wooosh! to you. That was funny.
Ok.
Certainly, each culture can and has named lands as they wish. My point in citing an Spanish source is because the other poster said that the name was '"THE Americas" [...] since explorers started coming.', which is false, because the first explorers in 1492 were Spanish and they named the continent America. It's all explained in that article. It explains also how the name "Americas" born.
I know English speakers differentiate North and South America, and I don't have a problem with that. We, in the Spanish world, do the same, but thinking of them as "subcontinents", for convenience probably.
But claiming that 'there is no continent of "America"" and shouting "ignorant" at you if you think otherwise is, at best, an overreaction.
As for Europe, Asia and Africa, you might have a point, if it weren't that the first explorers just called the whole land "America". That's it. Call it "historic reasons".
I thought for a moment it was a remote exploit for Solaris, or a breach in the containers ... It's good to see it's just the Sun
First of all, if you are right, there's no need to shout. Unless you have a serious personality issue ... or are probably a kid.
I see you like to back up your arguments with Wikipedia. Fine. Here's mine: América
and about the confusion in the anglo-world:
As for your tip, you're right, it's "THE Americas" and has been since explorers started coming here.
Wrong. As you can read from the article, it was América. Until England and its colonies came to América and messed up the naming.
You better go code something, help someone, have fun, angloamerican, instead of defending the undefendable. The proud for your country is untouched.
Take it easy.
Your reading comprehension is awesome. Bravo.
hey, slow down cowboy.
Assuming you're from the USA, let me inform you that 25% of your population is "hispanic" as you called them. Guess what will happen when the next generation arrives.
There's no need to be defensive about the "America" term. Get your facts right. America is a continent, the continent your country was named after.
You're implying it for me in your reply, when you talk about "North" and "South" America. Here's an exercise for you: get North, South and Central America, put them together and tell me what do you get (tip: no, it's not "Americas")
Alternatively, since most of America speaks a latin derived language (except the USA and Anglo-Canada), we might start using Angloamerica for the exceptions.
Actually, yes, they are.
I don't get the joke, care to explain?
The village is a traning stage. Fun begins when you get out from it.
As you already said, you don't have to buy a Qt commercial license to develop Qt commercial software, if you abide by the GPL (you have to make your changes available when distributing), which is a good thing, isn't it? There is your freedom.
I'm sure we agree that if your interest is on developing commercial closed source software then you don't care about freedom (FSF definition). Not wanting to pay for developing Qt closed source software speaks more about a cheap person than a person caring about freedom.
Being said that, I'm not a GPL fan. I use BSD for my projects.
Qt Open Source Edition is licensed under the GPL from a long time ago. http://troll.no/products/qt/licenses/licensing/opensource
As you may already know, every situation has its requirements; some require fast execution, others require fast prototyping, etc. My point: judging a language merit only by its execution speed is not smart.
I have come to Ruby after learning BASIC, C, C++, PHP and Perl, in that order. Ruby seems to me like an step further in my evolution as programmer. If I want execution speed, I use C. If I want development speed, I use Ruby.
Being said that, I'm really curious about the languages you mentioned. Learning Ruby helped me to widen my view about programming and languages, because Ruby itself is an hybrid of concepts taken from other languages like LISP, Smalltalk and Perl. I've _played_ with Lua, Smalltalk and Common Lisp. Haskell is in my to-do list.
I still prefer Ruby because it has all the features from those languages (all the features that I care of) and a syntax that is familiar to me, plus the amount of libraries available.
By the way, execution speed is being targeted in Ruby 2.0 (as you may already know) with YARV.
I see your point and I agree with you. GPLed projects are not exception to "make all software better".
Yes, I do believe that companies make contributions back to BSD code, as you and anybody else can verify. And it's a fact that BSD code can't reuse already GPLed code.
There shouldn't be any angry or sad faces, certainly. I would need to brandish an ethical or moral argument for that, on which you may or may not agree:
Why a GPL project would relicense a BSD code, in the knowledge that BSD code would not be able to get modifications back, instead of contributing to the same BSD project, under the light that both, the GPL and BSD project (free software both), would benefit from it?
Yes, it's permitted, it's legal, it is allowed by the license and any BSD coder knows it in advance, before choosing the BSD license. But it is not understandable, being the GPL project a "brother" free software project, that their developers wouldn't want to cooperate on a mutual beneficial project, started by the BSD developers.
I have no other argument.
(emphasis mine)
BSD guys are fine if anybody uses their code for any purposes, ergo there can't be any pervertion or abuse.
The only requirement is to give attribution, respecting the copyright. And that's where Jiry and Nick failed. Ok, they have already restored the license and copyright, but now they're putting their names as copyright holders when they haven't made any substantial changes to the original work.
In that scenario, the license is irrelevant. If those companies can't use your code because e.g. it is GPLed, they would write their own from scratch (if your software is that good that they are so eagger to replicate its functionality.) It's funny; that's what the FSF has been doing for a long time by the way.
Again, in that scenario, it would be better (from a BSD point of view) that these companies use that world class super-duper code, because this modified code, even if proprietary, extended, whatever, would be better than the code they would have written from scratch.
I know, it sounds naive at best (from a GPL point of view), that's why we can't understand each other.
Let's put it in a more "violent" way: if companies like Microsoft start selling high quality software for using high quality BSD code... Great! Good for them. That's the goal: make all software better.
I know, it's mind-boggling for an FSF/GNU supporter. I'm not pretending to change anybody's mind.
You both have illustrated perfectly the difference between GPL and BSD.
GPL guys want all software to be free. BSD guys want all software to be better.
That's why we can't understand each other. The parent states that Microsoft would have a better product, and that's great from a BSD point of view. And you see a threat if Microsoft has a better product which is not free.