That is a nice sentiment, but unfortunately untrue. People make snap judgments on based on everything they encounter: websites, each other,and even their politicians. While this is a behavior that can be manipulated pretty easily, it is absolutely necessary for people to be able to function in the world. There is too much going out there for a person to be able to logically weigh each action, and there is usually a lack of compelling evidence for any given action whatsoever. So, we rely on superficial indicators to guess with a fairly high degree of accuracy exactly how to react to any given situation.
While one could argue that we should try to rise above this behavior in regards to our elected officials, I really doubt that it is possible. The only way you could honestly divorce yourself from those snap judgments is to never ever see the politician, which just is not going to happen. Besides, there is a lot more to a politician than decision making. The person has to be able to manage, build consensus, and lead, all of which are things that repugnant people typically have a hard time doing.
It is spurious to claim that such trivialities do not influence you. They influence everybody.
I thought this was a slow week, too, so I popped over to the fire hose yesterday to see what was going on, and it was exactly jack and shit. It's kind of scary the kinds of worthless junk that people submit: lots of "hey check this outs" with just a link or a copy and-pasted press release from Dell. Say what you will about the editors, they do a pretty good job of putting the best submissions on the front page. The problem is, if we don't go find things quality articles to submit and take the time to write a summary, they won't have anything else to post but the Dell adverts.
and that's fairly typical: a normal Linux install contains very little Sun software (except maybe OpenOffice).
Gee, that's odd... why then does the European Commission say that Sun is the number one contributor to the entire Debian project? They made fewer actual kernel contributions than redhat, but still a lot.
So what if they have done bad things in the past? Right now, they support open source. As long as they keep supporting open source, I will support them.
Yes, but this is why I don't think that would be funny:
I need Open Source. I make my living with Linux. I need Linux to be strong and healthy. I need Apache and PHP. I need Bluefish, Kate and Quanta Plus. I contribute financially to a couple of products, although I don't have much to give. I learned how to do what I do by following Open Source documentation, asking questions on web forums, and mostly by downloading and installing the software to learn to use it for free. I never could have afforded to buy Windows Server 2003 with IIS as ASP just to learn, but it took me one evening to install and start learning debian, apache, mysql and php, and now I make my living with those tools. Do you understand how liberating that is? I was a sand-pounding infantryman for god's sake, and now a year later I am a skilled worker in the IT industry, thanks to Open Source.
If different members of the development community (and Sun is and continues to be a huge member of that community) perpetually sue each other, it hurts the Open Source reputation (which equals fewer customers and fewer developers) and it prevents them from working together toward the common goal of a better set of software for everybody.
Sun made the Java HotSpot virtual machine and compiler Free software under the GPL on November 13, 2006,[11] with a promise that the rest of the JDK (which includes the JRE) will be placed under the GPL by March 2007 ("except for a few components that Sun does not have the right to publish in source form under the GPL"). According to Richard Stallman, this means an end to the Java trap. Mark Shuttleworth called the initial press announcement, "A real milestone for the free software community".[12][13]
Following their promise, Sun released the complete source code of the Class library under GPL on May 8, 2007, except some limited parts that were licensed by Sun from 3rd parties who did not want their code to be released under an open-source license.[14][4] Sadly some of the encumbered parts turned out to be fairly key parts of the platform such as font rendering and 2D rasterisation. Sun's goal is to replace the parts that remain closed with alternative implementations and make the class library completely open.
If its good enough for Richard Stallman, its good enough for me.
Not to mention OpenOffice, Java, etc. Sun has brought a lot of good stuff into the Open Source world lately. I personally would hate to see them get spanked.
Because the PHBs do. You don't have to advocate it, just accept it and be willing to work with it when necessary. Then, when the time comes to advocate something else to your PHB, s/he will listen to you.
I got my boss to switch to open source for a lot of things that way.
They wrote their website with WORD, for the love of god, not even frontpage.
Now, look at the guy behind bars. Compare it to the picture of the guy who founded this little organization on the NYTimes page, Robert W. Peters. I am pretty sure that is the same dude.
Typically I try not to be smug about IT stuff since I know I am far from being a überh4cker, but given that their self-ordained mission is to patrol the internet, you would think that they could have hired somebody who understands how the internet works. This is typical extremist "judge what I know not" bullshit.
That'll teach them to never buy non-pirated videos in the future!
The fact that this comment is right on the money is really depressing.
I hate pirating as a way to get entertainment, not for some ephemeral moral reasons, but simply because it is a pain in the ass. Bittorrent takes forever (maybe that isn't true for everybody but my ISP shapes traffic), IRC and USENET are unreliable and ususally have queues. Quality is sometimes good sometimes not, you never know. If your tastes are the least bit eclectic or outdated, you can forget about finding what you want easily. Pirating entertainment just sucks. It sucks less than going to the store to get your entertainment, but it still sucks.
I would love to pay money (even at the current going rates for CDs and DVDs minus a couple bucks since I have to make my own cases and provide my own disks) to download quality files from fast servers. And, low and behold, every time somebody starts something like this, they make it suck more than pirating movies. You get tied to a platform, the store closes out from under you, you have to run an interface that shows you ads just so that you can play your music, movie, whatever.
How hard is it to make an interface that sucketh not? Their content is already on thepiratebay, so its not like offering video and music for download is going to increase piracy. They should at least offer a viable alternative for those of us who would rather pay (and I bet there are many of us).
Put the url obscenitycrimes.org in the Report URL box.
Under the "type of obscenity" check box, check "other" and place this text in the description box: "Obscene waste of my tax dollars and obscene violation of the first amendment
I know that it won't do anything, but it makes me feel a little better anyway.
It's not as if Oracle and your flavor of Linux are incredibly intertwined.
No, but I hope they will be someday. That's the point.
I run Debian for a variety of applications at home and at work, from desktop to to workstation to server. Among those systems, I have OpenOffice, which is mostly Sun Microsystems's baby, KDE, to which IBM is a significant contributor and sponsor, the QT toolkit that KDE is built on comes from Trolltech, Google and HP sponsor Apache, etc. Linux itself gets significant patches from Sun, RedHat, IBM and Novell, among many, many others. When Ubuntu came around, I saw a huge number or genuine improvements work their way into Debian desktops, and I am grateful for it.
So you see, actually, yes, the Linux ecosystem is very intertwined. I really do hope that Oracle starts developing for their distro and releasing it GPL. I see nothing in the articles here that suggests that this is the case (as opposed to the summary), but I think that any sign that a company will start contributing is relevant.
... and this is news? We should see tens of RedHat/Novell stories every day then.
No, because we know where those two companies stand vis-a-vis the Open Source community. We don't know where Oracle stands yet. So, it is interesting to read about what they do and hear the experience of others via the discussion. Thus, we will be able to learn if this is a new member of the community to be respected and watched in the future, or not.
Communism is a phase that is supposed to follow socialism.
That is what (most) communists think. I doubt very much that socialists think that their preferred system is just a stepping stone to another system. Similarly, according to Marx, capitalism was a phase that that was "supposed" to precede communism. That does not mean that capitalists think that they are in a transitory phase for communism.
Just because you like to lump everybody into a "left-right" continuum and everybody left of a democrat is a Das Kapital-thumping commie to you does not mean that that is the way everybody in that group of people thinks.
not socialist countries even though they do rely on socialism as an ideology.
So what, pray tell, makes you a socialist if not relying on and following socialism?
For my part, I'm not going to play the blame game since I don't know better either way. I am, however, in some strange way comforted to see that Windows users are starting to have issues with ATI drivers, too.
All those years of trying to get fglrx to work, avenged!
Copying this policy could really work for Slashdot I think.
That would not be Slashdot, if the editors did that. On slashdot,
Somebody posts a story,
We (the community) read (theoretically)it,
We discuss.
That last bit is what makes slashdot Slashdot. We talk. We have discussions, we learn from each other, or we just have fun. The discussions are great. They go off on all kinds of tangents, people bring in information that couches the story in different perspectives, and, for the stories that are actually about science and technology, they are pretty educational. It has nothing to do with news, really.
Google news is about news. So, they only allow people who have something to do with the story to comment. That makes sense, too, but not for Slashdot.
I have mod points but I just have to reply, even though this thread is old enough that nobody will read this.
Flash based websites? Nope. Flash is for movies, games and ads. I challenge you to name one "household" website that uses flash for anything other than this.
Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax is not a language, it is a method for writing Javascript. Please, try to run any AJAX based website with noscript on. It won't work. I know this because I have Ajax on my website.
As for Silverlight, as a web developer, I think it is a pretty silly technology. I would use for the same things I use flash for, but Flash already does what I need faster. Maybe I just lack imagination.
From a management standpoint, you guys might want to consider having a first stage that alerts the driver only and not his supervisor. It tends to be incredibly demoralizing to employees to feel like they are under constant surveillance and that their bosses know the most minor of mistakes they make. Demoralized employees, in turn, besides being less productive, tend to be much more accident prone. Give people the chance to fix themselves before alerting their supervisors.
Of course, I am not in the least familiar with your systems, but is just a thought.
Well, there are not many PNGs in the wild because IE6 does not support its alpha channel. Thus, there is no real reason to switch to PNG (although having a full color palette is nice by itself), especially concidering the hoops you have to jump through to get the file sizes down to the same size as a.gif (you need to use tools outside of GIMP/Photoshop such as optipng and pngnq). Web designers (I am, unfortunately, one of them) know how easy it would be to make slick looking websites using images with alpha channel (just having aliased edges for your logos is a huge advantage), but we don't use it because around 60% of our users can't render them properly. IE7 does support the alpha channel (finally) and all the other major browsers have supported it for years. As soon as IE6 falls below 5% market share (or so), people like me will start using PNGs very frequently.
They will replace.gifs, I promise you that, unless something better comes along between now and the time it takes for IE6 to die.
Slashdot Mirror
"corporate Linux (companies that are working with Microsoft)" ... "community Linux (companies that haven't yet partnered with Microsoft)"
Because, as we all know, RedHat and IBM are not corporations.
That is a nice sentiment, but unfortunately untrue. People make snap judgments on based on everything they encounter: websites, each other,and even their politicians. While this is a behavior that can be manipulated pretty easily, it is absolutely necessary for people to be able to function in the world. There is too much going out there for a person to be able to logically weigh each action, and there is usually a lack of compelling evidence for any given action whatsoever. So, we rely on superficial indicators to guess with a fairly high degree of accuracy exactly how to react to any given situation.
While one could argue that we should try to rise above this behavior in regards to our elected officials, I really doubt that it is possible. The only way you could honestly divorce yourself from those snap judgments is to never ever see the politician, which just is not going to happen. Besides, there is a lot more to a politician than decision making. The person has to be able to manage, build consensus, and lead, all of which are things that repugnant people typically have a hard time doing.
It is spurious to claim that such trivialities do not influence you. They influence everybody.
I thought this was a slow week, too, so I popped over to the fire hose yesterday to see what was going on, and it was exactly jack and shit. It's kind of scary the kinds of worthless junk that people submit: lots of "hey check this outs" with just a link or a copy and-pasted press release from Dell. Say what you will about the editors, they do a pretty good job of putting the best submissions on the front page. The problem is, if we don't go find things quality articles to submit and take the time to write a summary, they won't have anything else to post but the Dell adverts.
Besides, August is always slow.
Fixed URL:o c/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/d
So what if they have done bad things in the past? Right now, they support open source. As long as they keep supporting open source, I will support them.
Yes, but this is why I don't think that would be funny:
I need Open Source. I make my living with Linux. I need Linux to be strong and healthy. I need Apache and PHP. I need Bluefish, Kate and Quanta Plus. I contribute financially to a couple of products, although I don't have much to give. I learned how to do what I do by following Open Source documentation, asking questions on web forums, and mostly by downloading and installing the software to learn to use it for free. I never could have afforded to buy Windows Server 2003 with IIS as ASP just to learn, but it took me one evening to install and start learning debian, apache, mysql and php, and now I make my living with those tools. Do you understand how liberating that is? I was a sand-pounding infantryman for god's sake, and now a year later I am a skilled worker in the IT industry, thanks to Open Source.
If different members of the development community (and Sun is and continues to be a huge member of that community) perpetually sue each other, it hurts the Open Source reputation (which equals fewer customers and fewer developers) and it prevents them from working together toward the common goal of a better set of software for everybody.
The prospect of that is horrifies me.
Not to mention OpenOffice, Java, etc. Sun has brought a lot of good stuff into the Open Source world lately. I personally would hate to see them get spanked.
Hollywood is who I was talking about when I said "they". I guess I should have been clearer.
You are right on the money, me thinks.
Because the PHBs do. You don't have to advocate it, just accept it and be willing to work with it when necessary. Then, when the time comes to advocate something else to your PHB, s/he will listen to you.
I got my boss to switch to open source for a lot of things that way.
Now, look at the guy behind bars. Compare it to the picture of the guy who founded this little organization on the NYTimes page, Robert W. Peters. I am pretty sure that is the same dude.
Typically I try not to be smug about IT stuff since I know I am far from being a überh4cker, but given that their self-ordained mission is to patrol the internet, you would think that they could have hired somebody who understands how the internet works. This is typical extremist "judge what I know not" bullshit.
I hate pirating as a way to get entertainment, not for some ephemeral moral reasons, but simply because it is a pain in the ass. Bittorrent takes forever (maybe that isn't true for everybody but my ISP shapes traffic), IRC and USENET are unreliable and ususally have queues. Quality is sometimes good sometimes not, you never know. If your tastes are the least bit eclectic or outdated, you can forget about finding what you want easily. Pirating entertainment just sucks. It sucks less than going to the store to get your entertainment, but it still sucks.
I would love to pay money (even at the current going rates for CDs and DVDs minus a couple bucks since I have to make my own cases and provide my own disks) to download quality files from fast servers. And, low and behold, every time somebody starts something like this, they make it suck more than pirating movies. You get tied to a platform, the store closes out from under you, you have to run an interface that shows you ads just so that you can play your music, movie, whatever.
How hard is it to make an interface that sucketh not? Their content is already on thepiratebay, so its not like offering video and music for download is going to increase piracy. They should at least offer a viable alternative for those of us who would rather pay (and I bet there are many of us).
- Go to the complaint submission site and submit a complaint.
- Put the url obscenitycrimes.org in the Report URL box.
- Under the "type of obscenity" check box, check "other" and place this text in the description box: "Obscene waste of my tax dollars and obscene violation of the first amendment
I know that it won't do anything, but it makes me feel a little better anyway.I run Debian for a variety of applications at home and at work, from desktop to to workstation to server. Among those systems, I have OpenOffice, which is mostly Sun Microsystems's baby, KDE, to which IBM is a significant contributor and sponsor, the QT toolkit that KDE is built on comes from Trolltech, Google and HP sponsor Apache, etc. Linux itself gets significant patches from Sun, RedHat, IBM and Novell, among many, many others. When Ubuntu came around, I saw a huge number or genuine improvements work their way into Debian desktops, and I am grateful for it.
So you see, actually, yes, the Linux ecosystem is very intertwined. I really do hope that Oracle starts developing for their distro and releasing it GPL. I see nothing in the articles here that suggests that this is the case (as opposed to the summary), but I think that any sign that a company will start contributing is relevant.
The date line from the article on YaST
Friday, March 19 2004 10:32 AM
Democracy can be such a bitch sometimes.
Just because you like to lump everybody into a "left-right" continuum and everybody left of a democrat is a Das Kapital-thumping commie to you does not mean that that is the way everybody in that group of people thinks.So what, pray tell, makes you a socialist if not relying on and following socialism?
For my part, I'm not going to play the blame game since I don't know better either way. I am, however, in some strange way comforted to see that Windows users are starting to have issues with ATI drivers, too.
All those years of trying to get fglrx to work, avenged!
So, is that what you call passive aggression?
- Somebody posts a story,
- We (the community) read (theoretically)it,
- We discuss.
That last bit is what makes slashdot Slashdot. We talk. We have discussions, we learn from each other, or we just have fun. The discussions are great. They go off on all kinds of tangents, people bring in information that couches the story in different perspectives, and, for the stories that are actually about science and technology, they are pretty educational. It has nothing to do with news, really.Google news is about news. So, they only allow people who have something to do with the story to comment. That makes sense, too, but not for Slashdot.
Take care
-mat
+5?
I have mod points but I just have to reply, even though this thread is old enough that nobody will read this.
Flash based websites? Nope. Flash is for movies, games and ads. I challenge you to name one "household" website that uses flash for anything other than this.
Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax is not a language, it is a method for writing Javascript. Please, try to run any AJAX based website with noscript on. It won't work. I know this because I have Ajax on my website.
As for Silverlight, as a web developer, I think it is a pretty silly technology. I would use for the same things I use flash for, but Flash already does what I need faster. Maybe I just lack imagination.
From a management standpoint, you guys might want to consider having a first stage that alerts the driver only and not his supervisor. It tends to be incredibly demoralizing to employees to feel like they are under constant surveillance and that their bosses know the most minor of mistakes they make. Demoralized employees, in turn, besides being less productive, tend to be much more accident prone. Give people the chance to fix themselves before alerting their supervisors.
Of course, I am not in the least familiar with your systems, but is just a thought.
PNGs are a replacement for .gif, not JPG. They are used for different things.
Well, there are not many PNGs in the wild because IE6 does not support its alpha channel. Thus, there is no real reason to switch to PNG (although having a full color palette is nice by itself), especially concidering the hoops you have to jump through to get the file sizes down to the same size as a .gif (you need to use tools outside of GIMP/Photoshop such as optipng and pngnq). Web designers (I am, unfortunately, one of them) know how easy it would be to make slick looking websites using images with alpha channel (just having aliased edges for your logos is a huge advantage), but we don't use it because around 60% of our users can't render them properly. IE7 does support the alpha channel (finally) and all the other major browsers have supported it for years. As soon as IE6 falls below 5% market share (or so), people like me will start using PNGs very frequently.
.gifs, I promise you that, unless something better comes along between now and the time it takes for IE6 to die.
They will replace
Yeah, but I bet if you send an .odt or .ogg file it will get "lost"... :)
Have a good one,
-mat