This is why the GPL is a sham. It pretends to protect "freedom" of an inanimate or logical object by hijacking ownership for the "good" of people. The same people who rule by some pretend mob-rule and arrogantly think they are "saving the world" or some other bullshit. Get off the high horse of GPL and use a reasonable license.
I'm not saying it doesn't work great for some projects (Linux Kernel) but anyone who blindly accepts releasing their code under a license because it's popular and hip is a fool just like this guy.
Simple answer, if you want to retain ownership of your code and protect it from the hooliganism of the leftist GPL supporters, don't go for the GPL. There's a reason those projects release "community" editions.
Or should I wait another year? I didn't buy one because I didn't want to deal with HD or Blu-Ray. Should I wait another year for Blu-Ray to finish fleshing out the market, or is now a good time?
I have a feeling that later would be better because lots of companies who were holding back or weren't producing Blu-Ray players will probably now... Any ideas?
Trying to argument by calling things "merely the way they are" is what I hate my Christian enemies for.
All science comes from the idea that one does not know and uses a sound method to determine things. Until you know the process involved it is "the way things are". Things fell to the ground for centuries that's the way it was until we learned the force of gravity.
I don't know of any religion that accepts "that's the way things are", they all try to say "no it's not! This is the result of our doing something!!"
Try telling a Pentacostal that our existence is "just the way things are, no more no less" and let me know what kind of answer you get back.
BTW, I couldn't agree with you more on what infuriates me about them:)
Clearly you don't write (or at least read source for) applications of any substance as that would be mildly described as tedious if not impossible.
I have no idea how you formulated this from parent based from 2 or 3 sentences.
One of the best ways to understand code is to do so visually with the software equivalent of blueprints. UML is generally considered a very capable way of modeling/communicating both static structures and dynamic behavior of software.
A lot of times a programmer is stuck without those tools for any number of reasons. A lot of times people are stuck with spaghetti code which there is no documentation or design pattern to work with. I think your answer is assuming that the planets are aligned and we live in a utopia. Do you have any suggestions for people who have to deal with reality?
>and 70 years from now you'll probably see another surge of ingenuity and wonder in western-hemisphere technology.
I wouldn't put money on it though. there has been nothing since the 70's
We'll see (well, we won't!!). When you examine the technological progress of any culture, comparing & contrasting to the other cultures of any era there is a distinct ebb & flow of tides where one outshines the other for a while and the others copycat - then overtake the advancing leader for an even greater period. After a few cycles this is in turn proceeded by a dark age where all cultures meander along to let the social aspects of civilization learning how to mature with these technologies at which point there is a renaissance.
I suspect that we are approaching another "dark age" though a minor one. Perhaps for the next century.
This is a natural cycle of markets. (or greed, or laziness or whatever...) now the US is resting on their laurels, reaping the benefits of engineers past and eventually will pay dearly economically for this culture's unwillingness to churn out better engineers.... and 70 years from now you'll probably see another surge of ingenuity and wonder in western-hemisphere technology.
Even if I did leave my doors and windows unlocked anyone that entered without my person would be doing so illegally and subject to my wrath.
Before I comment I'll say I completely agree with your statement and would probably shoot a trespasser.
The precedence in America has now been set that this is not the case. According to the RIAA by leaving my computer insecure and not changing the default share settings in Kazaa or eMule (or whatever) I am liable for sharing all the files that it detects even though people should know better than to download them.
You want to see something scary? Go to emule and type in "xls" or something.
...and since this is slashdot, it's not good enough until they've also:
1. refunded all money earned through use of these formats 2. allow people to fork them and then demand that their idiot-forks get recombined into the trunk and incorporated into MS Office 09 3. #2 isn't good enough, Microsoft must even make sure that they are in the next release of OO even though they have nothing to do with that product 4. Clipart of Steve Ballmer throwing chairs is included 5. it is released under the GPLv3 license 6. the EU gets to fine them another trillion euros (with a lower-case e) for every day since 1980 that the formats have not been open 7. none of the above points matter because Microsoft sucks anyway and no one @ slashdot uses MS Office, they all use OO (yea, right!)
Exactly! Which just goes to show any child born in America can dream about growing up and one day winning the popular vote for president... And still be screwed out of the presidency
No one gets screwed out of anything, that's just wishful thinking. The truth is much more mundane and less interesting. The system is designed to prevent megalomanical assholes like who you speak of from ruling via their perverted sense of self-importance.
Yes, in the open-source world, success is measured differently.
For example, in the land of open-source projects, having a premium "Mrskin.com" account would be the equivalent of "successfully" copping a feel off of Angelina Jolie.
Not only that, a fork would actually be copping a feel from Brad Pitt.
Microsoft has some responsibility to its customers to make sure they can access their data
They most certainly do not. That's like saying that sony has a responsibility to keep making record players. Sure they do but because of consumer demand not because of some faulty-responsibility.
Now OTOH, it is pretty low for MS to not... but there's certainly no responsibility there...
I would think most open-source DEVELOPMENT would be unhindered if not enhanced because all those out-of-work nerds who are coding away in their free time have much more time to work on that OSS project when they're laid off...
The worst part? Many people in this nation think the rich got rich because of *snicker* merit.
This is probably completely OT but I just wanted to point out that everyone in my family got rich on their merit. We came to America with nothing during WW2, my parents' generation (in my family of course) all worked their asses off, joined the military to get their college degrees when they had to and they are all wealthy from their hard work being doctors, accountants and engineers. Now my generation in my family, we grew up living in shacks as my parents worked hard to get to where they are today. We went to public schools, spent our time in libraries learning, worked to pay for college (well not my youngest siblings, they get to enjoy the fruits, yay for them!!) and now my sister is doing well as an accountant, I've made a pretty penny programming, my cousin is a forensic biologist, my other cousin whatever she's doin @ UW, she's makin' good money doing it.
While we're not all millionaires (yet) we're all probably in the richest 1% of the world population and all for hard-work and merit.
Maybe you just mean the wealthy celebrities like our politicians and entertainers...
I remember in high school reading about in the middle ages when people would buy offsets for their sins so they could get out of hell or something... not far off it sounds
Oh come on, aren't you being a tad bit nit-picky here? I'm no MS shill but who really cares if they use the word "open" in their marketing lexicon when RMS and everyone else has been using it for decades while I can tell you, the "openness" of the "open source" community to the n00b is QUITE THE OPPOSITE.
Besides, why do you care what Microsoft puts in their ads or if their customers are getting ripped off? I've mentioned it time and time again to my friends and business contacts when they ask my advice, don't use MS products for this or that, here's an alternative that will better suit your needs, 95% of the time they end up going with Microsoft products anyway and then come running to me for help when using said product isn't as easy as they were led to believe and yet they still keep going back.
Microsoft isn't putting ANYONE in the poor house by using a shifty marketing department to sell their products. Is everyone who posts on this site completely sheltered from the rest of the world that they think that someone is going to close up shop because they can't afford that copy of SQL Server? Or that Debian is going to be dismantled because "Microsoft TRICKED THEM INTO BUYING WINDOWS OMFFGGGG!!%^%$&^:"
Come on, are you 12??
They can call it The Purple Haired Donkey Butt Initiative for all I care and it means the same thing.
Why don't you go back to doing the good work you do and complain about something real?
Oh, this wasn't meant specifically at parent but pretty much all the nitpicking here.
This is not a troll. Hate having to preface things with that because mods here are so reactionary (but that's a different topic now!)...
There are some huge issues with the OLPC project. I'd say about 90% of the issues are misrepresented by people's agendas in this thread (read:anti-capitalists, AMD fanbois, Intel fanbois, etc...).
The problems are that: -the organization is poorly run -the officers are greedy -the commercials to get you to donate suck -the laptops are *NOT* being used as intended (well duh, come on!) -the product looks like a toy -false ideals are being used to further various agendas -Microsoft wants a piece of the pie of course
The people who turned something which could be a good idea, could be altruistic, could make some changes in the world have actually created an unhealthy political baby which is being used by all sorts of uncouth individuals at all points and I'm not surprised Intel resigned. I won't donate to the United Way for the same reasons. The charity sucks and I'm better off giving cash to bums who would rather buy beer and cocaine than clothing and food.
I recall PC World sucking the tit of Microsoft and espousing the wonders of MS Vista before it came out. Looks like they're backtracking. Guess they still haven't learned the lesson of not hyping a product before they have a chance to try it. I don't buy a word they say about anything good or bad for any product.
Bandwidth is simply too much of a variable when considering reliability of data delivery in an application. Never mind all the privacy issues and data theft and such. Ask any exec when dealing with a B2B application where mission-critical data is dependent on an unstable network. As cool as I think Google's web apps are you'll never convince an exec.
Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer's parents are going to have to get past my parents if they hope to invade my basement stronghold.
My dad can beat up your dad!
Somehow a civilization of bone-marrow specialist dykes does not seem all that likely...
Slashdot members tend to represent the more educated and successful members to begin with
Which ones have you been talking to? I'd like to know. It can't be the ones who seem to have scripts to mod everything as flamebait or troll...
This is why the GPL is a sham. It pretends to protect "freedom" of an inanimate or logical object by hijacking ownership for the "good" of people. The same people who rule by some pretend mob-rule and arrogantly think they are "saving the world" or some other bullshit. Get off the high horse of GPL and use a reasonable license.
I'm not saying it doesn't work great for some projects (Linux Kernel) but anyone who blindly accepts releasing their code under a license because it's popular and hip is a fool just like this guy.
Simple answer, if you want to retain ownership of your code and protect it from the hooliganism of the leftist GPL supporters, don't go for the GPL. There's a reason those projects release "community" editions.
Or should I wait another year? I didn't buy one because I didn't want to deal with HD or Blu-Ray. Should I wait another year for Blu-Ray to finish fleshing out the market, or is now a good time?
I have a feeling that later would be better because lots of companies who were holding back or weren't producing Blu-Ray players will probably now... Any ideas?
write incendiary comments on slashdot and try to skirt that fine line between insightful and flamebait during what little downtime I have :)
Trying to argument by calling things "merely the way they are" is what I hate my Christian enemies for.
All science comes from the idea that one does not know and uses a sound method to determine things. Until you know the process involved it is "the way things are". Things fell to the ground for centuries that's the way it was until we learned the force of gravity.
I don't know of any religion that accepts "that's the way things are", they all try to say "no it's not! This is the result of our doing something!!"
Try telling a Pentacostal that our existence is "just the way things are, no more no less" and let me know what kind of answer you get back.
BTW, I couldn't agree with you more on what infuriates me about them
Clearly you don't write (or at least read source for) applications of any substance as that would be mildly described as tedious if not impossible.
I have no idea how you formulated this from parent based from 2 or 3 sentences.
One of the best ways to understand code is to do so visually with the software equivalent of blueprints. UML is generally considered a very capable way of modeling/communicating both static structures and dynamic behavior of software.
A lot of times a programmer is stuck without those tools for any number of reasons. A lot of times people are stuck with spaghetti code which there is no documentation or design pattern to work with. I think your answer is assuming that the planets are aligned and we live in a utopia. Do you have any suggestions for people who have to deal with reality?
>and 70 years from now you'll probably see another surge of ingenuity and wonder in western-hemisphere technology.
I wouldn't put money on it though. there has been nothing since the 70's
We'll see (well, we won't!!). When you examine the technological progress of any culture, comparing & contrasting to the other cultures of any era there is a distinct ebb & flow of tides where one outshines the other for a while and the others copycat - then overtake the advancing leader for an even greater period. After a few cycles this is in turn proceeded by a dark age where all cultures meander along to let the social aspects of civilization learning how to mature with these technologies at which point there is a renaissance.
I suspect that we are approaching another "dark age" though a minor one. Perhaps for the next century.
We are infants compared to what we play with.
This is a natural cycle of markets. (or greed, or laziness or whatever...) now the US is resting on their laurels, reaping the benefits of engineers past and eventually will pay dearly economically for this culture's unwillingness to churn out better engineers.... and 70 years from now you'll probably see another surge of ingenuity and wonder in western-hemisphere technology.
Even if I did leave my doors and windows unlocked anyone that entered without my person would be doing so illegally and subject to my wrath.
Before I comment I'll say I completely agree with your statement and would probably shoot a trespasser.
The precedence in America has now been set that this is not the case. According to the RIAA by leaving my computer insecure and not changing the default share settings in Kazaa or eMule (or whatever) I am liable for sharing all the files that it detects even though people should know better than to download them.
You want to see something scary? Go to emule and type in "xls" or something.
...and since this is slashdot, it's not good enough until they've also:
1. refunded all money earned through use of these formats
2. allow people to fork them and then demand that their idiot-forks get recombined into the trunk and incorporated into MS Office 09
3. #2 isn't good enough, Microsoft must even make sure that they are in the next release of OO even though they have nothing to do with that product
4. Clipart of Steve Ballmer throwing chairs is included
5. it is released under the GPLv3 license
6. the EU gets to fine them another trillion euros (with a lower-case e) for every day since 1980 that the formats have not been open
7. none of the above points matter because Microsoft sucks anyway and no one @ slashdot uses MS Office, they all use OO (yea, right!)
so go ahead, mod me down you fuckers.
Exactly! Which just goes to show any child born in America can dream about growing up and one day winning the popular vote for president... And still be screwed out of the presidency
No one gets screwed out of anything, that's just wishful thinking. The truth is much more mundane and less interesting. The system is designed to prevent megalomanical assholes like who you speak of from ruling via their perverted sense of self-importance.
Yes, in the open-source world, success is measured differently.
For example, in the land of open-source projects, having a premium "Mrskin.com" account would be the equivalent of "successfully" copping a feel off of Angelina Jolie.
Not only that, a fork would actually be copping a feel from Brad Pitt.
Microsoft has some responsibility to its customers to make sure they can access their data
They most certainly do not. That's like saying that sony has a responsibility to keep making record players. Sure they do but because of consumer demand not because of some faulty-responsibility.
Now OTOH, it is pretty low for MS to not... but there's certainly no responsibility there...
I would think most open-source DEVELOPMENT would be unhindered if not enhanced because all those out-of-work nerds who are coding away in their free time have much more time to work on that OSS project when they're laid off...
How large can a singularity be?
I mean, if they used the word "massive" I'd get it. But large?
I believe they are measuring the event horizon, not the singularity.
The worst part? Many people in this nation think the rich got rich because of *snicker* merit. This is probably completely OT but I just wanted to point out that everyone in my family got rich on their merit. We came to America with nothing during WW2, my parents' generation (in my family of course) all worked their asses off, joined the military to get their college degrees when they had to and they are all wealthy from their hard work being doctors, accountants and engineers. Now my generation in my family, we grew up living in shacks as my parents worked hard to get to where they are today. We went to public schools, spent our time in libraries learning, worked to pay for college (well not my youngest siblings, they get to enjoy the fruits, yay for them!!) and now my sister is doing well as an accountant, I've made a pretty penny programming, my cousin is a forensic biologist, my other cousin whatever she's doin @ UW, she's makin' good money doing it. While we're not all millionaires (yet) we're all probably in the richest 1% of the world population and all for hard-work and merit. Maybe you just mean the wealthy celebrities like our politicians and entertainers...
I remember in high school reading about in the middle ages when people would buy offsets for their sins so they could get out of hell or something... not far off it sounds
Oh come on, aren't you being a tad bit nit-picky here? I'm no MS shill but who really cares if they use the word "open" in their marketing lexicon when RMS and everyone else has been using it for decades while I can tell you, the "openness" of the "open source" community to the n00b is QUITE THE OPPOSITE.
Besides, why do you care what Microsoft puts in their ads or if their customers are getting ripped off? I've mentioned it time and time again to my friends and business contacts when they ask my advice, don't use MS products for this or that, here's an alternative that will better suit your needs, 95% of the time they end up going with Microsoft products anyway and then come running to me for help when using said product isn't as easy as they were led to believe and yet they still keep going back.
Microsoft isn't putting ANYONE in the poor house by using a shifty marketing department to sell their products. Is everyone who posts on this site completely sheltered from the rest of the world that they think that someone is going to close up shop because they can't afford that copy of SQL Server? Or that Debian is going to be dismantled because "Microsoft TRICKED THEM INTO BUYING WINDOWS OMFFGGGG!!%^%$&^:"
Come on, are you 12??
They can call it The Purple Haired Donkey Butt Initiative for all I care and it means the same thing.
Why don't you go back to doing the good work you do and complain about something real?
Oh, this wasn't meant specifically at parent but pretty much all the nitpicking here.
Who modded parent down? Mod up! That is spot-on!
This is not a troll. Hate having to preface things with that because mods here are so reactionary (but that's a different topic now!)...
There are some huge issues with the OLPC project. I'd say about 90% of the issues are misrepresented by people's agendas in this thread (read:anti-capitalists, AMD fanbois, Intel fanbois, etc...).
The problems are that:
-the organization is poorly run
-the officers are greedy
-the commercials to get you to donate suck
-the laptops are *NOT* being used as intended (well duh, come on!)
-the product looks like a toy
-false ideals are being used to further various agendas
-Microsoft wants a piece of the pie of course
The people who turned something which could be a good idea, could be altruistic, could make some changes in the world have actually created an unhealthy political baby which is being used by all sorts of uncouth individuals at all points and I'm not surprised Intel resigned. I won't donate to the United Way for the same reasons. The charity sucks and I'm better off giving cash to bums who would rather buy beer and cocaine than clothing and food.
Wake me up when the bullshit reasons stop.
I recall PC World sucking the tit of Microsoft and espousing the wonders of MS Vista before it came out. Looks like they're backtracking. Guess they still haven't learned the lesson of not hyping a product before they have a chance to try it. I don't buy a word they say about anything good or bad for any product.
Thank you CBS, for finally doing the right thing.If you think this post is a troll you are mistaking it for your mother.
Bandwidth is simply too much of a variable when considering reliability of data delivery in an application. Never mind all the privacy issues and data theft and such. Ask any exec when dealing with a B2B application where mission-critical data is dependent on an unstable network. As cool as I think Google's web apps are you'll never convince an exec.