Typical pseudo-elitist crap I have come to expect from a Mac user over the years. Don't bash me, my wife is one.
I am yet to come across a single case of Dells (or IBMs for that matter) being "cheap" in the sense you mean to use here. They last as long as Macs do. In fact, my home file server is an eight year old Dell running Debian with a stack of USB drives. We have done upgrades over the years - new USB card, bigger USB drives as our storage needs have expanded, etc. But it is yet to cost me an arm and a leg like my wife's Mac cost her when she tried to "upgrade" her Powerbook. Turned out it was cheaper to buy a new machine than do a hardware upgrade. For the same specs, Macs are consistently more expensive, even now when they use same / similar Intel chips as the rest of us. And don't even get into hardware upgrades - its not even funny.
I would have bought your argument if we were windows users - Mac OSX beats windows XP hollow in terms of stability, etc. But our household converted to a complete non-windows situation years ago, and Linux, as far as apps I need in my work are concerned, beats Mac OSX. GNU apps are updated as an afterthought in fink and the entire idea of a closed source OS that could be spying on you for commercial purposes is so last century.
So, if being funnily snooty is what floats your boat while trying to hide the hurt of overpriced hardware that Steve sells, go ahead, but don't think for a second that you are fooling too many of us. My father taught me long ago that paying more for less or the same to appear cool to some shallow friends is adolescent stupidity and most rational people want no part of that.
Mac being higher quality than the competition is an argument strangely akin to the experience that Hillary claims as her own. False, accepted by the uncritical and self-serving at the same time.
Scenes of panic and chaos reigned as the giant robot assembled in space by a joint Canadian US expedition started firing laser beams at uncontrolled locations in North America. Visions of an inhuman, headless robot destroying the world has been the stuff of science fiction over the decades. That vision became reality early on Sunday morning as many towns across the continent were hit in a barrage of devastating but inaccurate fire. According to reports, an industrial laser mounted on one of the arms malfunctioned and the servo mechanism controlling that arm has failed causing the giant robot to flail out. Experts are unsure as to how long these potentially lethal disruptions would continue as the robot is in a geosynchronous orbit. Attempts to use the other robotic arm to arrest the malfunctioning arm have failed as the control software is designed to forbid simultaneous motion of both arms. Canadian designers declined comment but highly placed sources within NASA indicate that they, like their creation, do not have a leg to stand on. The White House has sought Chinese assistance in shooting down the robot. There is talk of a 9 figure sum being demanded by the Chinese but these reports are currently unsubstantiated.
There is tons of legacy code in FORTRAN. netlib is an easily accessible example.
I was talking about new code development. Big vendors like NAG and others have long since moved to Fortran 95 and C. The latter does not have as much traction because of the complicated and platform dependent nature of interfacing from FORTRAN to C (which is necessary if you do not wish to rewrite decades worth of well tested high performance code), but most Fortran 95 compilers offer switches that can handle legacy code quite happily.
Good suggestion. The number crunching world has long since moved on to Fortran 95 and F2K in any case. No one in their right mind messes with FORTRAN any more.
I have no desire to carry that mental image any further, but its hard for FCC or anyone else to crawl up telco's arses looking for places to attach a fine simply because there is so much stinky traffic going the opposite direction all the time.
Speaking purely as an independent.
About the only way the GOP could have won this year was :
1. They nominate someone with appeal to centrists and independents. They nominated McCain. Check.
2. Get their nominee out there quickly or at least quicker than the Democrats. Check.
3. The Democrats have a brokered convention where a lot of ill-will is generated within the party amid allegations of overturning the voters' verdict. Could now happen as Obama will probably end with more elected delegates and these "superdelegates" (the ones John Stewart compares to delegates that glow green) give the nomination to Hillary. Check.
or,
4. The Democrat nominee is so badly damaged by the end of the nomination process that he has no room to recover. Check. Clinton is now doing this to Obama. And a formerly overly lenient media is now becoming overly harsh on him. Great strategy - in 4 years, she can walk to the nomination even if she cannot steal it now.
I was probably going to vote for Obama in the general, but if Hillary is the nominee, McCain gets my whole hearted vote and support. Sorry, two crooks in 16 years is about two too many.
1. Federal government does something that is stupid in the long term to gain something short term.
2. Years later, shit hits fan.
3. Cover up.
Rinse and repeat.
I wonder if the person who modded it up to "Insightful" was high when he did so.
Whether Red Hat is following the Microsoft/drug dealer mode of marketing is quite moot - Red Hat could not get harsh on CentOS even if wanted to - except the logos and update related stuff, everything Red Hat packages is GPL'ed, and the moment Red Hat tried to pull a trick, it would lose its own license to distribute Linux.
People at Red Hat might have their episodes of being dumb - like shutting down their desktop versions after RH 9, but their license precludes them from doing something quite as stupid / destructive as what you are talking about.
Of course, Red Hat could spend months obfuscating the code and moving libraries around (a highly deprecated procedure when you have a working product) but the moment they tried to distribute, GPL would at once apply (derivative work) and it would be back where it started.
As someone else on this thread, who sounded like a Red Hat employee, said, Red Hat understand the kind of code they are handling, and there is not a thing they can do to CentOS even if they wanted to (and I do not think they even want to, given how much bad publicity it would generate - cancelling out the huge amount of sympathy they won from the community and from consumers by refusing to be a second Judas after Novell).
That said, this entire discussion is a trifle meaningless and the original article highly misleading (at least the slashdot summary).
I think you and many of the people on this thread are royally missing the point.
The issue is not space superiority, but direction.
Yes, we have some impressive achievements over the past few years - landing on an asteroid, the current probe to Pluto, etc. The question is - why aren't we out there in person ?
I am not from the 60s generation. However, could one be forgiven for thinking that if we had put 17 people on the moon by 1974, we could have had a permanent presence on the moon by now ? Like a lunar base ? And perhaps, if all the Presidents from Nixon and forward had kept their eye on the ball, we could perhaps be talking seriously about terraforming Mars, given the mess our planet is in (from a resource standpoint) ? And given that we cannot do much right now if a comet or an asteroid decided to pay a personal visit to us in 2020, might it not be prudent to have the human race have another home in the solar system in case the unthinkable happens. Yes, we do not matter much in the larger scheme of things of the Universe, given that we inhabit an obscure corner of an average galaxy, but isn't the instinct to survive the strongest human instinct ?
The projected population of Earth for 2050 is about 9.5 billion people. Do you honestly think that this planet can support this many people, and if not, do you think that the task of colonizing other planets (with Mars being the prime candidate), can be done quickly in a decade or so ?
It is the job of leadership to foresee these problems and think ahead. One of my oldest uncles, who was a Marine, died two years ago. He used to say that you do not pay for the same real estate twice and you never surrender momentum if you have it. We had the momentum in early 70s. Instead of moving forward, we met with the Soviets in space once (1975), got giddy eyed, got our head buried under the sand, and started dicking around with relatively minor pursuits like building a space station (something we and Soviets had already individually done, with the Soviets being more advanced than us) and building a space shuttle system (when none of that seemed to be needed for any of the Apollo's - and in any case, that effort could have been a separate one). This is not to say that a space station is not important, but it cannot be the sole focus of a space faring power that has previously sent men to another heavenly body in the past.
It comes down to leadership, our pathetic and borderline treasonous mainstream media (and I mean both the allegedly liberal and conservative sides of it), and how addled our people's brains have become with worthless pursuits (like figuring out who is dating whom in Hollywood). I used to be a member of that media and I quit in disgust last month after years of watching my reports being filed away because the consultants thought that another shot of Anna Nicole Smith's cleavage might be more important than a report on the educational rise of India.
The issue is not whether we have done that. The issue is what have we done in space that has a direct and chilling bearing on our future in a few decades. Our absence from space is more than a mere act of allowing the Chinese and Indians to catch up in the space version of "I am the big kahuna", it is incredibly short sighted from the point of view of the future of the entire human race.
Isn't it obvious ?
Scientists can't be bothered to spend time and money on intellectually dumb and street smart political consultants who tell them to take version 3456 position on Iraq war, or abortion, or triangulate, etc.
There are some scientists in politics. Congressman Bartlett of Maryland is one (not my congressman, but I like him).
A deeper reason is that our media (I quit my job with the newspaper and am going back to school) are more interested in discussing the size of Anna Nicole Smith's unmentionables than anything that really matters. We deserve the leadership we get. Years of living outside the US has convinced me that we are an incurably provincial and short-sighted people, good natured enough to let every Murdoch or Bush or Clinton fool us and take us for a ride.
While my uncle and his wife are busy having fights with their youngest daughter about what prom dress she is going to wear and precisely how much alcohol is appropriate for her brother to drink, kids in India are busy studying calculus or laboring hard under an afternoon sun to get enough money for their hungry family (in spite of their labor laws). I have no reason to think that China is any different.
We show every sign of a once great people in terminal decline. All great civilizations of the past have fallen by suicide and not murder. Why should our lot be any different ? Our priorities are wrong and getting worse, day by day.
This one isn't even that.
FCC requires that software be end-user replaceable. Tivo, and some other companies using GPLv2 code have been doing precisely the opposite.
One of the more prominent things that GPLv3 does is to force companies to make their software end-user replaceable (the anti-Tivoization clause). And this *BSD "genius" thinks that that is somehow going to contravene FCC's requirement ?
What is next ? "People should move away from implementing neighborhood watch programs because they might contravene / impede the application of laws
against sexual predators targeting kids" ?
Was the slashdot editor high at the time when he / she let it through ? Or was he just a frustrated *BSD distributor ?
Sorry to have to be the one to point this out, but India + China population is about 2.45 billion http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbrank.pl, which works out to be about 37%. And that is slowly rising, in spite of massive population growth rates in the Islamic bloc countries.
The question is not why China (which has a very warm relationship with Microsoft) or India (which has a huge English speaking population) disapproved of OOXML. The question is why did so many European countries that should have a problem with OOXML's US English centric definitions voted to approve OOXML.
I am not outrightly contesting the correlation presented here, just questioning why did so many low CPI countries in Europe with excellent reasons to vote against OOXML, vote for it.
I do not think that there is any argument that BSD is more free than GPL.
The issue is whether the freedom they respectively provide is sustainable - GPL is, BSD often isn't as modifications do not necessarily come back to enhance the initial product.
Rough analogy :
Is a modern constitutional republic less free than a society with no rules, where people may do exactly as they please, with no restrictions ? Most definitely yes.
Is the modern constitutional republic more likely to survive than the chaotic society described above ? On balance of evidence, yes.
Once again, the same theme appears to emerge. The kind of freedom that BSD provides is not sustainable as proven by the anaemic performance of FreeBSD, PCBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD (the last one is almost dead) compared to Linux.
So, the issue is not what is more technically free, the issue is - is that freedom going to grow and last ?
Microsoft Corp. today offered to settle claims of GPL violations in its flagship products, Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Windows XP, by agreeing to pay Free Software Foundation (FSF) a sum of $4.8 billion, and agreeing to discontinue the marketing of said products as closed source until all infringing code in the software is identified and removed to FSF's satisfaction. FSF sources could not be reached for immediate comment. Microsoft co-founder, CEO, and chief software architect, Wlliam Gates, in a press conference late Friday, stated that the episode had been a difficult one for Microsoft, and appealed for patience from shareholders and customers as his company scrambled to respond to the latest news.
The present case is a landmark case arising out of a series of sensational revelations last year that these products included infringing code, and that Microsoft stood in violation of GPL. Present readers will recall that the then CEO of Microsoft, Steven Ballmer initially rubbished the claims. However, that stance became untenable when scores of former Microsoft employees, notably in India and China, came out with startling accusations that their managers actively encouraged wholesale copying of GPL'ed code available in public domain to meet the unreasonable deadlines imposed by senior Microsoft functionaries. It now appears that certain portions of a failed Microsoft operating system (Windows Vista) released four years ago included significant amount of infringing GPL'ed code, and could form the basis of a series of new lawsuits.
Microsoft profits have been in a gradual decline for the past few years since its sponsored format (OOXML) failed to meet widespread acceptance as a document standard. Attempts to reverse engineer OOXML to make it compatible with the industry standard, ODF, have been less than successful. Industry analysts think that the decline and possible demise of Microsoft Office, unthinkable even 3 years ago, will cause only minor disruptions as most enterprise customers are standardized on GPL compatible OpenOffice.org v.4. Commercial solutions exist for migration of legacy documents to OpenDocument format and should be suitable for most customers.
A year ago, William Gates resumed his work at Microsoft as its CEO after Steven Ballmer resigned under acrimonious circumstances, and tried to remake the once vast organization as a services company. However, the company has faced severe competition from established global players like IBM, Wipro, Infosys and TCS and struggled to meet market expectations.
The Justice Department's two year old investigation into questionable marketing practices by Microsoft and allegations of misleading customers is still underway. Justice department spokespersons would not be drawn into commenting on rumors of impending charges under the Rico statute for blackmailing computer system manufacturers over a period of 10 years.
Microsoft stock (MSFT) fell 12% in moderate trading at close.
Respect is earned. Not demanded or begged for.
If Linux foundation wants respect for Microsoft, they could do well by getting Microsoft to make Microsoft Office ODF compliant (and I do not mean half-baked one way conversion plugins), and ditching OOXML.
I run a home network back home that has 1 OpenBSD server, 1 Linux server, 4 Linux laptops/desktops and 1 Mac. Precisely how are any of these "anti-virus" tools relevant to me ?
Who will HP pick? Madriva or Fedora maybe. There are no maybe's about it. HP has already picked Debian for support and has made a lot of money off it.
They have in-house Debian expertise. It would be crazy for them to support anything else.
Their strategy could easily look like :
1. Debian Stable for their servers.
2. Debian Testing / Unstable (or even Sidux) for any laptops they may decide to sell later.
In terms of not-going-away-ness, Debian is the only game in town. It has the sheer size (15,000+ packages), long history, a reputation for stable really meaning stable (and not some half-baked approximation that so many other distros throw out in their frenzied rush to be out of the door) and a prickly opposition to anything that limits freedom (according to its narrowest definitions), and yet giving users the choice to use non-free repositories if they so wish. It is ideal for any vendor that wishes to make sure its products are not encumbered by any real (as opposed to Microsoft's FUD level) IP issues - just make sure/etc/apt/sources.list does not ship with non-free (or even contrib) repos enabled, and yet wish to transfer the choice to users.
Barring Slackware, which is a one man show, and Redhat, which is a one company show, Debian is the only distro with a track record that inspires real confidence. You can make it as stable and old (Stable) or as bleeding edge (Unstable + Experimental) as you want. Its not surprising that HP has already embraced it. I would not be surprised if HP announced the availability of Debian Testing for home users and Debian Stable + Backports for enterprise users before the year is out.
If there were ever an operating system armageddon, where operating systems began falling by the wayside, Debian would be the very last to go.
I would tend to agree, however, even the best intentioned people cannot do much when they are so horribly ill-informed. Yes, the literacy rate in the US is much higher than most parts of the world, but education surely consists of much more than just a diploma.
We journalists are to blame. I personally focus on covering only stuff that I consider serious, but every now and then, I get irritating requests from the office about some "human interest" stories (as if there is no human interest in reporting on the powerful dynamics of 1/6th of humanity rise up from its slumber and begin to reclaim its place at the head of the economic table like it was in the late 17th century.
But I grit my teeth and do it, because my boss pays the bills. I have lost count of how many times my reports about the level of science and math interest among Indian school students, comparing that to the happenings back home, have been quietly ignored because my employers were interested in running 24 hour coverage of some drunk frat girl lost in Aruba. At times, I have considered quitting.
However, I have no major complaints since I get to cover interesting stuff even if the audiences back home will never see/read 99% of what I report on. If I was home, I would have been forced to cover some sex offender who got out of jail and killed someone. Maybe I would have quit. If you have anyone to blame about the shitty state of affairs back, blame us, because we have failed you and do not do our jobs. Every news channel is now a tabloid and I know if I had to watch what passes for news back home, I would stop watching it. Scifi and Law and Order probably have more reality in them than some of crap that our bosses churn out.
Slashdot Mirror
Typical pseudo-elitist crap I have come to expect from a Mac user over the years. Don't bash me, my wife is one.
I am yet to come across a single case of Dells (or IBMs for that matter) being "cheap" in the sense you mean to use here. They last as long as Macs do. In fact, my home file server is an eight year old Dell running Debian with a stack of USB drives. We have done upgrades over the years - new USB card, bigger USB drives as our storage needs have expanded, etc. But it is yet to cost me an arm and a leg like my wife's Mac cost her when she tried to "upgrade" her Powerbook. Turned out it was cheaper to buy a new machine than do a hardware upgrade. For the same specs, Macs are consistently more expensive, even now when they use same / similar Intel chips as the rest of us. And don't even get into hardware upgrades - its not even funny.
I would have bought your argument if we were windows users - Mac OSX beats windows XP hollow in terms of stability, etc. But our household converted to a complete non-windows situation years ago, and Linux, as far as apps I need in my work are concerned, beats Mac OSX. GNU apps are updated as an afterthought in fink and the entire idea of a closed source OS that could be spying on you for commercial purposes is so last century.
So, if being funnily snooty is what floats your boat while trying to hide the hurt of overpriced hardware that Steve sells, go ahead, but don't think for a second that you are fooling too many of us. My father taught me long ago that paying more for less or the same to appear cool to some shallow friends is adolescent stupidity and most rational people want no part of that.
Mac being higher quality than the competition is an argument strangely akin to the experience that Hillary claims as her own. False, accepted by the uncritical and self-serving at the same time.
Scenes of panic and chaos reigned as the giant robot assembled in space by a joint Canadian US expedition started firing laser beams at uncontrolled locations in North America. Visions of an inhuman, headless robot destroying the world has been the stuff of science fiction over the decades. That vision became reality early on Sunday morning as many towns across the continent were hit in a barrage of devastating but inaccurate fire. According to reports, an industrial laser mounted on one of the arms malfunctioned and the servo mechanism controlling that arm has failed causing the giant robot to flail out. Experts are unsure as to how long these potentially lethal disruptions would continue as the robot is in a geosynchronous orbit. Attempts to use the other robotic arm to arrest the malfunctioning arm have failed as the control software is designed to forbid simultaneous motion of both arms. Canadian designers declined comment but highly placed sources within NASA indicate that they, like their creation, do not have a leg to stand on. The White House has sought Chinese assistance in shooting down the robot. There is talk of a 9 figure sum being demanded by the Chinese but these reports are currently unsubstantiated.
There is tons of legacy code in FORTRAN. netlib is an easily accessible example.
I was talking about new code development. Big vendors like NAG and others have long since moved to Fortran 95 and C. The latter does not have as much traction because of the complicated and platform dependent nature of interfacing from FORTRAN to C (which is necessary if you do not wish to rewrite decades worth of well tested high performance code), but most Fortran 95 compilers offer switches that can handle legacy code quite happily.
Good suggestion. The number crunching world has long since moved on to Fortran 95 and F2K in any case. No one in their right mind messes with FORTRAN any more.
The mind boggles.
I have no desire to carry that mental image any further, but its hard for FCC or anyone else to crawl up telco's arses looking for places to attach a fine simply because there is so much stinky traffic going the opposite direction all the time.
Speaking purely as an independent.
About the only way the GOP could have won this year was :
1. They nominate someone with appeal to centrists and independents. They nominated McCain. Check.
2. Get their nominee out there quickly or at least quicker than the Democrats. Check.
3. The Democrats have a brokered convention where a lot of ill-will is generated within the party amid allegations of overturning the voters' verdict. Could now happen as Obama will probably end with more elected delegates and these "superdelegates" (the ones John Stewart compares to delegates that glow green) give the nomination to Hillary. Check.
or,
4. The Democrat nominee is so badly damaged by the end of the nomination process that he has no room to recover. Check. Clinton is now doing this to Obama. And a formerly overly lenient media is now becoming overly harsh on him. Great strategy - in 4 years, she can walk to the nomination even if she cannot steal it now.
I was probably going to vote for Obama in the general, but if Hillary is the nominee, McCain gets my whole hearted vote and support. Sorry, two crooks in 16 years is about two too many.
You mean to tell me that there are authorized billing scams ? I get it, that must be my monthly cellphone bill.
From Steve Ballmer ? One wonders.
1. Federal government does something that is stupid in the long term to gain something short term. 2. Years later, shit hits fan. 3. Cover up. Rinse and repeat.
How does this differ from LabVIEW / G programming ?
Don't worry. The best selling digital multimeters in many labs are from a company called "Fluke" (German I think).
I wonder if the person who modded it up to "Insightful" was high when he did so.
Whether Red Hat is following the Microsoft/drug dealer mode of marketing is quite moot - Red Hat could not get harsh on CentOS even if wanted to - except the logos and update related stuff, everything Red Hat packages is GPL'ed, and the moment Red Hat tried to pull a trick, it would lose its own license to distribute Linux.
People at Red Hat might have their episodes of being dumb - like shutting down their desktop versions after RH 9, but their license precludes them from doing something quite as stupid / destructive as what you are talking about.
Of course, Red Hat could spend months obfuscating the code and moving libraries around (a highly deprecated procedure when you have a working product) but the moment they tried to distribute, GPL would at once apply (derivative work) and it would be back where it started.
As someone else on this thread, who sounded like a Red Hat employee, said, Red Hat understand the kind of code they are handling, and there is not a thing they can do to CentOS even if they wanted to (and I do not think they even want to, given how much bad publicity it would generate - cancelling out the huge amount of sympathy they won from the community and from consumers by refusing to be a second Judas after Novell).
That said, this entire discussion is a trifle meaningless and the original article highly misleading (at least the slashdot summary).
Finally, its official. 'nuff said.
I think you and many of the people on this thread are royally missing the point.
The issue is not space superiority, but direction.
Yes, we have some impressive achievements over the past few years - landing on an asteroid, the current probe to Pluto, etc. The question is - why aren't we out there in person ?
I am not from the 60s generation. However, could one be forgiven for thinking that if we had put 17 people on the moon by 1974, we could have had a permanent presence on the moon by now ? Like a lunar base ? And perhaps, if all the Presidents from Nixon and forward had kept their eye on the ball, we could perhaps be talking seriously about terraforming Mars, given the mess our planet is in (from a resource standpoint) ? And given that we cannot do much right now if a comet or an asteroid decided to pay a personal visit to us in 2020, might it not be prudent to have the human race have another home in the solar system in case the unthinkable happens. Yes, we do not matter much in the larger scheme of things of the Universe, given that we inhabit an obscure corner of an average galaxy, but isn't the instinct to survive the strongest human instinct ?
The projected population of Earth for 2050 is about 9.5 billion people. Do you honestly think that this planet can support this many people, and if not, do you think that the task of colonizing other planets (with Mars being the prime candidate), can be done quickly in a decade or so ?
It is the job of leadership to foresee these problems and think ahead. One of my oldest uncles, who was a Marine, died two years ago. He used to say that you do not pay for the same real estate twice and you never surrender momentum if you have it. We had the momentum in early 70s. Instead of moving forward, we met with the Soviets in space once (1975), got giddy eyed, got our head buried under the sand, and started dicking around with relatively minor pursuits like building a space station (something we and Soviets had already individually done, with the Soviets being more advanced than us) and building a space shuttle system (when none of that seemed to be needed for any of the Apollo's - and in any case, that effort could have been a separate one). This is not to say that a space station is not important, but it cannot be the sole focus of a space faring power that has previously sent men to another heavenly body in the past.
It comes down to leadership, our pathetic and borderline treasonous mainstream media (and I mean both the allegedly liberal and conservative sides of it), and how addled our people's brains have become with worthless pursuits (like figuring out who is dating whom in Hollywood). I used to be a member of that media and I quit in disgust last month after years of watching my reports being filed away because the consultants thought that another shot of Anna Nicole Smith's cleavage might be more important than a report on the educational rise of India.
The issue is not whether we have done that. The issue is what have we done in space that has a direct and chilling bearing on our future in a few decades. Our absence from space is more than a mere act of allowing the Chinese and Indians to catch up in the space version of "I am the big kahuna", it is incredibly short sighted from the point of view of the future of the entire human race.
Isn't it obvious ?
Scientists can't be bothered to spend time and money on intellectually dumb and street smart political consultants who tell them to take version 3456 position on Iraq war, or abortion, or triangulate, etc.
There are some scientists in politics. Congressman Bartlett of Maryland is one (not my congressman, but I like him).
A deeper reason is that our media (I quit my job with the newspaper and am going back to school) are more interested in discussing the size of Anna Nicole Smith's unmentionables than anything that really matters. We deserve the leadership we get. Years of living outside the US has convinced me that we are an incurably provincial and short-sighted people, good natured enough to let every Murdoch or Bush or Clinton fool us and take us for a ride.
While my uncle and his wife are busy having fights with their youngest daughter about what prom dress she is going to wear and precisely how much alcohol is appropriate for her brother to drink, kids in India are busy studying calculus or laboring hard under an afternoon sun to get enough money for their hungry family (in spite of their labor laws). I have no reason to think that China is any different.
We show every sign of a once great people in terminal decline. All great civilizations of the past have fallen by suicide and not murder. Why should our lot be any different ? Our priorities are wrong and getting worse, day by day.
This one isn't even that.
FCC requires that software be end-user replaceable. Tivo, and some other companies using GPLv2 code have been doing precisely the opposite.
One of the more prominent things that GPLv3 does is to force companies to make their software end-user replaceable (the anti-Tivoization clause). And this *BSD "genius" thinks that that is somehow going to contravene FCC's requirement ?
What is next ? "People should move away from implementing neighborhood watch programs because they might contravene / impede the application of laws against sexual predators targeting kids" ?
Was the slashdot editor high at the time when he / she let it through ? Or was he just a frustrated *BSD distributor ?
Sorry to have to be the one to point this out, but India + China population is about 2.45 billion http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbrank.pl, which works out to be about 37%. And that is slowly rising, in spite of massive population growth rates in the Islamic bloc countries.
The question is not why China (which has a very warm relationship with Microsoft) or India (which has a huge English speaking population) disapproved of OOXML. The question is why did so many European countries that should have a problem with OOXML's US English centric definitions voted to approve OOXML.
I am not outrightly contesting the correlation presented here, just questioning why did so many low CPI countries in Europe with excellent reasons to vote against OOXML, vote for it.
I do not think that there is any argument that BSD is more free than GPL.
The issue is whether the freedom they respectively provide is sustainable - GPL is, BSD often isn't as modifications do not necessarily come back to enhance the initial product.
Rough analogy : Is a modern constitutional republic less free than a society with no rules, where people may do exactly as they please, with no restrictions ? Most definitely yes. Is the modern constitutional republic more likely to survive than the chaotic society described above ? On balance of evidence, yes.
Once again, the same theme appears to emerge. The kind of freedom that BSD provides is not sustainable as proven by the anaemic performance of FreeBSD, PCBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD (the last one is almost dead) compared to Linux.
So, the issue is not what is more technically free, the issue is - is that freedom going to grow and last ?
Microsoft Corp. today offered to settle claims of GPL violations in its flagship products, Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Windows XP, by agreeing to pay Free Software Foundation (FSF) a sum of $4.8 billion, and agreeing to discontinue the marketing of said products as closed source until all infringing code in the software is identified and removed to FSF's satisfaction. FSF sources could not be reached for immediate comment. Microsoft co-founder, CEO, and chief software architect, Wlliam Gates, in a press conference late Friday, stated that the episode had been a difficult one for Microsoft, and appealed for patience from shareholders and customers as his company scrambled to respond to the latest news.
The present case is a landmark case arising out of a series of sensational revelations last year that these products included infringing code, and that Microsoft stood in violation of GPL. Present readers will recall that the then CEO of Microsoft, Steven Ballmer initially rubbished the claims. However, that stance became untenable when scores of former Microsoft employees, notably in India and China, came out with startling accusations that their managers actively encouraged wholesale copying of GPL'ed code available in public domain to meet the unreasonable deadlines imposed by senior Microsoft functionaries. It now appears that certain portions of a failed Microsoft operating system (Windows Vista) released four years ago included significant amount of infringing GPL'ed code, and could form the basis of a series of new lawsuits.
Microsoft profits have been in a gradual decline for the past few years since its sponsored format (OOXML) failed to meet widespread acceptance as a document standard. Attempts to reverse engineer OOXML to make it compatible with the industry standard, ODF, have been less than successful. Industry analysts think that the decline and possible demise of Microsoft Office, unthinkable even 3 years ago, will cause only minor disruptions as most enterprise customers are standardized on GPL compatible OpenOffice.org v.4. Commercial solutions exist for migration of legacy documents to OpenDocument format and should be suitable for most customers.
A year ago, William Gates resumed his work at Microsoft as its CEO after Steven Ballmer resigned under acrimonious circumstances, and tried to remake the once vast organization as a services company. However, the company has faced severe competition from established global players like IBM, Wipro, Infosys and TCS and struggled to meet market expectations.
The Justice Department's two year old investigation into questionable marketing practices by Microsoft and allegations of misleading customers is still underway. Justice department spokespersons would not be drawn into commenting on rumors of impending charges under the Rico statute for blackmailing computer system manufacturers over a period of 10 years.
Microsoft stock (MSFT) fell 12% in moderate trading at close.
What you describe is not a problem. It is a solution. Why should channels that struggle to attract viewers remain afloat in a competitive system ?
Respect is earned. Not demanded or begged for. If Linux foundation wants respect for Microsoft, they could do well by getting Microsoft to make Microsoft Office ODF compliant (and I do not mean half-baked one way conversion plugins), and ditching OOXML.
I run a home network back home that has 1 OpenBSD server, 1 Linux server, 4 Linux laptops/desktops and 1 Mac. Precisely how are any of these "anti-virus" tools relevant to me ?
They have in-house Debian expertise. It would be crazy for them to support anything else.
Their strategy could easily look like :
1. Debian Stable for their servers.
2. Debian Testing / Unstable (or even Sidux) for any laptops they may decide to sell later.
In terms of not-going-away-ness, Debian is the only game in town. It has the sheer size (15,000+ packages), long history, a reputation for stable really meaning stable (and not some half-baked approximation that so many other distros throw out in their frenzied rush to be out of the door) and a prickly opposition to anything that limits freedom (according to its narrowest definitions), and yet giving users the choice to use non-free repositories if they so wish. It is ideal for any vendor that wishes to make sure its products are not encumbered by any real (as opposed to Microsoft's FUD level) IP issues - just make sure
Barring Slackware, which is a one man show, and Redhat, which is a one company show, Debian is the only distro with a track record that inspires real confidence. You can make it as stable and old (Stable) or as bleeding edge (Unstable + Experimental) as you want. Its not surprising that HP has already embraced it. I would not be surprised if HP announced the availability of Debian Testing for home users and Debian Stable + Backports for enterprise users before the year is out.
If there were ever an operating system armageddon, where operating systems began falling by the wayside, Debian would be the very last to go.
I would tend to agree, however, even the best intentioned people cannot do much when they are so horribly ill-informed. Yes, the literacy rate in the US is much higher than most parts of the world, but education surely consists of much more than just a diploma.
We journalists are to blame. I personally focus on covering only stuff that I consider serious, but every now and then, I get irritating requests from the office about some "human interest" stories (as if there is no human interest in reporting on the powerful dynamics of 1/6th of humanity rise up from its slumber and begin to reclaim its place at the head of the economic table like it was in the late 17th century.
But I grit my teeth and do it, because my boss pays the bills. I have lost count of how many times my reports about the level of science and math interest among Indian school students, comparing that to the happenings back home, have been quietly ignored because my employers were interested in running 24 hour coverage of some drunk frat girl lost in Aruba. At times, I have considered quitting.
However, I have no major complaints since I get to cover interesting stuff even if the audiences back home will never see/read 99% of what I report on. If I was home, I would have been forced to cover some sex offender who got out of jail and killed someone. Maybe I would have quit. If you have anyone to blame about the shitty state of affairs back, blame us, because we have failed you and do not do our jobs. Every news channel is now a tabloid and I know if I had to watch what passes for news back home, I would stop watching it. Scifi and Law and Order probably have more reality in them than some of crap that our bosses churn out.