Your app will be trivially portable to OS X and Windows for one. IMHO, the most exciting design goal for KDE4 is to completely abstract the X and Unix APIs away. KDE4 for Windows and OS X won't include Workplace features like kwin and plasma but it will include the dependencies necessary to run apps like Koffice, Konqueror, Amarok, and K3B.
The realm of science is all that is testable and observable. A thinking theist that wants his religion safe from science forever makes no claims that are testable.
MC Hammer? He may have understood how to get a better deal than breakout artists usually get but he didn't understand doodly about keeping money. He didn't realize that his proverbial 15 minutes wasn't going to last forever and blew through that money in a couple of years with no long-term popularity to fall back on. He was even the subject of one of those "life comes at you fast" commercials. The big mansion with dancers grooving in front of it one minute and the "bankruptcy For Sale" sign was on it the next.
The best artists are capable of holding my attention for an entire album. Bands like Supertramp and Pink Floyd were masters of it. It isn't albums that need to end. Artists who can't go the ton and produce good ones just need to stop and stick to singles.
They've screwed themselves by over controlling things from the studio clear out to the Radio Station. Frank Zappa did a pretty good job of predicting this state of affairs in his (open admitted to be ghostwritten) late eighties autobiography. I won't quote it word for word but it went something like this:
In the fifties and sixties, it was mostly young people with funny hair playing the music and old crusty businessmen who owned the clubs and record labels. These crusty old men didn't seem to understand the music itself but they could see what "the kids" were buying. Since they weren't in the least hip, it wasn't all that hard to get them to try marketing some slightly avant garde or even outright experimental music. After all, you could luck out and be on the ground floor of the next big thing.
At some point, someone got the big idea "Why don't we get some of these young kids to scout out the talent and pick what to promote. They 'get it' because they have the same hair......" Once that happened, what was currently cool just seemed to last forever because everybody started imitating everyone else. They made sure kids "with the same hair" were in the radio stations, vetting acts for the clubs, and deciding who would get signed. Once this process was complete, there was less room to try new things. You had to sound like whoever was currently "big".
Fast forward a few years and this process of fed-back self-imitation was made even worse with payola to the radio stations. Once upon a time, local radio stations would throw some local guys or just some funky record from these new guys in L.A. on the turntable to see if people liked it. Not now. The music industry fell into the same trap the movie industry fell into: They'll only market what "know" will sell. The only things that they "know" will sell is what has been sold already. Everything just collapses into tapioca with no room for innovation whatsover. Even those occasional new tunes you hear don't stand out in any way.
The Internet self-distributing independents have really been taking off lately because that is where there is still room to try something different. It isn't always wonderful but at least the bits that are good aren't strangled in the crib by some studio marketing flack.
The GPL isn't special in this regard. Enforcing any license will require the services of a lawyer and motivation on the part of a copyright holder. You can run your business anyway you want to but I follow the law in my business dealings. You can always just assume you can bully your way through life and you may even be often correct but sooner or later you either run into a target harder than you thought it was or someone with the tenacity to follow through if they are are outraged.
Those who oppose the GPL don't have to use code so covered. If you do use code so covered then either comply with the license or reach another arrangement with the author(s). And I've always wondered why THAT simple truth seems so hard to grasp.
Not all GPL code was written by two hippie wannabees in their parents basement. An awful lot of it is owned by real corporations that can afford to pay real lawyers real money. If your business started making money, they'd either want some of it or compliance with the license on their code.
The problem is that an awful lot of GPL non-compliant use of covered works in embedded applications is going on. It seems to be standard practice to be out of compliance by default until called on it. Once called on it, drag your feet as long as possible. The default practice should be compliance from day one. These large companies have legal departments don't they? If they use something like a Microsoft SDK, they aren't violating the licenses as a matter of practice on those now are they?
There's precedent. Ashcroft lost to a corpse as well. Anyway, I said someone like Richards except for the dead part. If they have to, Democrat men will simply lie to their wives about voting for Hilary.
Polling is a funny thing. Hilary may poll better against Obama or Edwards but she'll poll lousy against most Republicans. That is, she'll do a superior job of parroting the Democratic party line but will look pretty damn horrible to most guys from the Midwest, West, and especially the South (more than a few of the women too). Fair or not, she comes off like a high society ballbuster. She's a complete loser in the likability department. Yes, superficial shit like this matters. Bush got more than a few votes for being more handsome and personable than Kerry. JFK did well for the same reason.
I'll pick another deader since this one actually happened. Hilary look much like Margaret Thatcher to you? And it isn't that I'm happy about it. If she loses to a Republican like Guliani then we get 8 more years of Bush-lite.
I've personally watched a cop torture a suspect by holding his head in a mud puddle with his foot. I didn't see this shit on TV; it was 20 feet away. So you'll just have to excuse the hell of out those of us who are skeptical about handing cops yet another easy way to torture someone.
As I mentioned in another post, PS2 is just a red herring. An off the shelf PC is much more configurable and programmable with less effort. If you had read what I was saying more carefully, the small RC craft were only to be used to test the guidance system: "When you get them crashing into the things you want to crash them into, you install the guidance system into two or three full scale mockups and test them out the middle of nowhere." A general enough control system can control a small plane over radio just as well as it can control a large one it has been directly wired into. No one will notice or care that you are crashing a lot of little RC planes so you use them to get the bulk of your development and testing done.
Incidentally, a small RC craft may not take out a building but it could carry a grenade just fine. No fancy guidance system is required for this. Fly it from a hidden location and detonate it near the personnel you are attacking. Even the military is now using small RC craft for surveillance.
I don't buy this entirely. You can test with ordinary hobbyist RC aircraft and connect it to a ground guidance system by radio. When you get them crashing into the things you want to crash them into, you install the guidance system into two or three full scale mockups and test them out the middle of nowhere. There's plenty of places you could test them without drawing undue attention.
It would also be a mistake to assume pure terrorism is the only use of a cheap guided weapon. I can think of a few military applications.
That is yet another way a terrorist using small means can cost our society millions and billions. Guide a $5000 weapon with a $500 dollar GPS and the government with the backing of millions of scared Escalade driving soccer mommies will deny further civilian use of GPS.
Terrorism only works if we allow ourselves to be terrorized. Terrorists can not end our way of life all by themselves. They can only produce bloody displays that are small compared to our reaction to them. The problem is that we have allowed ourselves to become a fearful craven people.
The PS3 part is a red herring; sure you could use one but a general purpose PC is a better fit for your missile builder on a budget.
A few years ago, a New Zealander set out to prove that DIY cruise missile is doable with off-the-shelf parts. When his work started to prove embarrassing, the NZ govt used some foul means to shut him down. A cruise missile is little more than a self-piloted aircraft packed full of explosive. Granted, they get sophisticated in a hurry once you build small efficient special-purpose devices. Still, you could make a cruise missile out of most any common PC, some servos, some sensors, and a small aircraft, and a whole lotta fertilizer. An old Piper Cub would work just fine. For that matter, you could just turn the old Cub into a remote control aircraft and use it to attack any target of your choice within 10 miles of the take-off strip.
The Soviets had the advantage that they could hide their failures and shout their triumphs. At least as many of their rockets blew up on the pad as ours. You don't learn how to build rockets without blowing some up which lesson these small private firms are learning the hard way. So when we have one fail and it's true to this day, there has to be three or four years of investigations and committees and hand-wringing before we can launch anything else. As far as propaganda goes, a flaming rocket sinking into the pad looks just GREAT. The Soviets would just shrug, learn from wreckage if there was anything to be quickly learned, then shoot off the next one.
It wasn't that we couldn't have competed with the Soviets in rocketry earlier, it was largely a matter of emphasis. We put our money and research into smaller more efficient nukes and jet bombers to deliver them. Rather than compete on ground we had been staking out for years, they threw their efforts at rockets which would gain them parity much more quickly.
And yes, believing the Soviets stupid and backward was a mistake. They weren't stupid at any rate and could throw the weight of the entire state into any chosen area they wanted to compete against the West on. As a whole considering consumer goods and their general economy, they WERE more than a bit backward; I never stood in line three hours to get four rolls of East German toliet paper but was nothing backward about anything they considered of strategic importance.
and it's more or less clear that the Republican will lose the next elections.
Ah but you forget that the Dems are the masters when it comes to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. All they have to is nominate Hilary. She'll sweep the primaries but will not prevail against even the biggest douche the Republicans can come up with. I'm not saying a woman can't be president. Someone like Ann Richards would be much less of a guaranteed disaster but Hilary ain't it.
That only works on completely anonymous nobodies. TPB is a fairly well known. Said thugs would also have to operate in a foreign country that won't be terribly inclined to leniency if they're caught. I suspect the sort operating the Pirate Bay would love nothing better than to trace and expose something like that. The Purple One is better off sticking to lawyering.
Metallica attacked the PAN newsreader project because it included an mp3 decoder (gasp!) and was being funded at the time by the same VP funding Napster. It was basically a bullshit guilt-by-association thing. The best part was Metallica's attorney asking one of the developers on the stand "How would you like it if someone gave away your work for free on the Internet?" He seemed completely flabbergasted when the rest of the dev team and the developer burst out laughing.
It is customary for newsreaders and other Internet protocol software to use internal and external decoders on file formats. PAN certainly wasn't unique in that regard. Those Metallica dipshits just thought "ZOMG! It's something else that downloads mp3s! Napster BAD!" Their being cool about the live shows doesn't entirely absolve them of the "bad reputation". Attacking the only FOSS project making a decent GUI newsreader at the time definitely put them in the thoughtless jerk category as far as I'm concerned.
That's actually my intent. The package in question is used to write IEPs. For a school district, that is as mission critical as it gets. Having the IEP server consistently take a dump in the middle of IEP season is what made me a major hater of FM Pro. A really gross app at this company I moonlight for hasn't been fun either.
If there is one call I hate to get, it's the one that goes like this, "I have an IEP meeting with the parents in 2 hours and the server gives this table not found error when I went in to print! HELP!!!!" Now imagine getting clusters of those several years in a row. I have hit the point where I am in fact going to develop a LAMP app to do this.
You've also tapped into something I've long suspected about FM Pro. It is RDBMS, widget library, and scripting engine all in one. I believe other database apps gain robustness in all those things being separate modules. It's like an automatic transmission in that trouble in one part spreads to everything else and it is running the thing hot that will do it.
My scalability concerns are a bit more serious than a badly designed table/query structure making the application slow. We have a mission critical third-party app that runs on FM Pro (which I inherited....). During the crunch times when the relevant staff are making heavy and simultaneous use of the app, I've had database corruptions for three years running. Now it may indeed be the case that crappy programming is at fault here (I wouldn't doubt it actually. And yes, we are seeking alternatives. The functionality is difficult to replace.) but the experience hasn't bolstered my confidence in the FM Pro dependency. I've also seen similar behavior from other FM Pro apps.
Given some heavy demonstrations, I may concede that an FM Pro dev who knows what he's doing can build a reliable, robust, and scalable applications. What would still make me a hater is it invites casual development which PHBs are then won't to deploy widely. I see it as an extra shiny Foot Howitzer that begs in a sultry woman's voice "Shoot Me!". In such cases, the worst thing it will do isn't get really slow. It's apt to munch data.
Something like Postgre on the other hand requires at least a journeyman level of competence to even get it to do anything. Things like Access, Postgre, and even MySQL have an inherent bozo filter that weeds out the worst of the poseurs.
If this is the case, why don't FOSS licenses specifically disavow that right. That would be an easy way for the likes of MS to create trouble: buy out important FOSS developers then revoke all licenses. Even if antitrust concerns prevent MS from doing it, it seems quite the nasty sideline for patent troll firms to get into.
Well, that actually is my problem with FileMaker Pro. It too seduces you into thinking that developing database apps are easy and fun. The difference is that when an FM Pro app starts flaking out (public school systems are just eaten up with FM Pro deployments that got too big for their britches) there isn't a "big brother" product to easily transition to that scales.
Yeah it's true that Access is a gateway drug to SQL Server. But that IS a viable upgrade path for that little workgroup app that some PHP decided to expose to a 10,000 node WAN.
WINE is not and I doubt it will ever be a good way of running general random Windows apps. However, it can be targeted as an environment by Windows developers who want a quick and dirty port of an app. If the app is built with WINE in mind and shipped with a (possibly patched) version of WINE targeted then it can work quite well.
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Your app will be trivially portable to OS X and Windows for one. IMHO, the most exciting design goal for KDE4 is to completely abstract the X and Unix APIs away. KDE4 for Windows and OS X won't include Workplace features like kwin and plasma but it will include the dependencies necessary to run apps like Koffice, Konqueror, Amarok, and K3B.
The realm of science is all that is testable and observable. A thinking theist that wants his religion safe from science forever makes no claims that are testable.
But if they're engaging in fucktardery?
MC Hammer? He may have understood how to get a better deal than breakout artists usually get but he didn't understand doodly about keeping money. He didn't realize that his proverbial 15 minutes wasn't going to last forever and blew through that money in a couple of years with no long-term popularity to fall back on. He was even the subject of one of those "life comes at you fast" commercials. The big mansion with dancers grooving in front of it one minute and the "bankruptcy For Sale" sign was on it the next.
The best artists are capable of holding my attention for an entire album. Bands like Supertramp and Pink Floyd were masters of it. It isn't albums that need to end. Artists who can't go the ton and produce good ones just need to stop and stick to singles.
They've screwed themselves by over controlling things from the studio clear out to the Radio Station. Frank Zappa did a pretty good job of predicting this state of affairs in his (open admitted to be ghostwritten) late eighties autobiography. I won't quote it word for word but it went something like this:
In the fifties and sixties, it was mostly young people with funny hair playing the music and old crusty businessmen who owned the clubs and record labels. These crusty old men didn't seem to understand the music itself but they could see what "the kids" were buying. Since they weren't in the least hip, it wasn't all that hard to get them to try marketing some slightly avant garde or even outright experimental music. After all, you could luck out and be on the ground floor of the next big thing.
At some point, someone got the big idea "Why don't we get some of these young kids to scout out the talent and pick what to promote. They 'get it' because they have the same hair......" Once that happened, what was currently cool just seemed to last forever because everybody started imitating everyone else. They made sure kids "with the same hair" were in the radio stations, vetting acts for the clubs, and deciding who would get signed. Once this process was complete, there was less room to try new things. You had to sound like whoever was currently "big".
Fast forward a few years and this process of fed-back self-imitation was made even worse with payola to the radio stations. Once upon a time, local radio stations would throw some local guys or just some funky record from these new guys in L.A. on the turntable to see if people liked it. Not now. The music industry fell into the same trap the movie industry fell into: They'll only market what "know" will sell. The only things that they "know" will sell is what has been sold already. Everything just collapses into tapioca with no room for innovation whatsover. Even those occasional new tunes you hear don't stand out in any way.
The Internet self-distributing independents have really been taking off lately because that is where there is still room to try something different. It isn't always wonderful but at least the bits that are good aren't strangled in the crib by some studio marketing flack.
The GPL isn't special in this regard. Enforcing any license will require the services of a lawyer and motivation on the part of a copyright holder. You can run your business anyway you want to but I follow the law in my business dealings. You can always just assume you can bully your way through life and you may even be often correct but sooner or later you either run into a target harder than you thought it was or someone with the tenacity to follow through if they are are outraged.
Those who oppose the GPL don't have to use code so covered. If you do use code so covered then either comply with the license or reach another arrangement with the author(s). And I've always wondered why THAT simple truth seems so hard to grasp.
Not all GPL code was written by two hippie wannabees in their parents basement. An awful lot of it is owned by real corporations that can afford to pay real lawyers real money. If your business started making money, they'd either want some of it or compliance with the license on their code.
The problem is that an awful lot of GPL non-compliant use of covered works in embedded applications is going on. It seems to be standard practice to be out of compliance by default until called on it. Once called on it, drag your feet as long as possible. The default practice should be compliance from day one. These large companies have legal departments don't they? If they use something like a Microsoft SDK, they aren't violating the licenses as a matter of practice on those now are they?
There's precedent. Ashcroft lost to a corpse as well. Anyway, I said someone like Richards except for the dead part. If they have to, Democrat men will simply lie to their wives about voting for Hilary.
Polling is a funny thing. Hilary may poll better against Obama or Edwards but she'll poll lousy against most Republicans. That is, she'll do a superior job of parroting the Democratic party line but will look pretty damn horrible to most guys from the Midwest, West, and especially the South (more than a few of the women too). Fair or not, she comes off like a high society ballbuster. She's a complete loser in the likability department. Yes, superficial shit like this matters. Bush got more than a few votes for being more handsome and personable than Kerry. JFK did well for the same reason.
I'll pick another deader since this one actually happened. Hilary look much like Margaret Thatcher to you? And it isn't that I'm happy about it. If she loses to a Republican like Guliani then we get 8 more years of Bush-lite.
I've personally watched a cop torture a suspect by holding his head in a mud puddle with his foot. I didn't see this shit on TV; it was 20 feet away. So you'll just have to excuse the hell of out those of us who are skeptical about handing cops yet another easy way to torture someone.
As I mentioned in another post, PS2 is just a red herring. An off the shelf PC is much more configurable and programmable with less effort. If you had read what I was saying more carefully, the small RC craft were only to be used to test the guidance system: "When you get them crashing into the things you want to crash them into, you install the guidance system into two or three full scale mockups and test them out the middle of nowhere." A general enough control system can control a small plane over radio just as well as it can control a large one it has been directly wired into. No one will notice or care that you are crashing a lot of little RC planes so you use them to get the bulk of your development and testing done.
Incidentally, a small RC craft may not take out a building but it could carry a grenade just fine. No fancy guidance system is required for this. Fly it from a hidden location and detonate it near the personnel you are attacking. Even the military is now using small RC craft for surveillance.
I don't buy this entirely. You can test with ordinary hobbyist RC aircraft and connect it to a ground guidance system by radio. When you get them crashing into the things you want to crash them into, you install the guidance system into two or three full scale mockups and test them out the middle of nowhere. There's plenty of places you could test them without drawing undue attention.
It would also be a mistake to assume pure terrorism is the only use of a cheap guided weapon. I can think of a few military applications.
That is yet another way a terrorist using small means can cost our society millions and billions. Guide a $5000 weapon with a $500 dollar GPS and the government with the backing of millions of scared Escalade driving soccer mommies will deny further civilian use of GPS.
Terrorism only works if we allow ourselves to be terrorized. Terrorists can not end our way of life all by themselves. They can only produce bloody displays that are small compared to our reaction to them. The problem is that we have allowed ourselves to become a fearful craven people.
The PS3 part is a red herring; sure you could use one but a general purpose PC is a better fit for your missile builder on a budget.
A few years ago, a New Zealander set out to prove that DIY cruise missile is doable with off-the-shelf parts. When his work started to prove embarrassing, the NZ govt used some foul means to shut him down. A cruise missile is little more than a self-piloted aircraft packed full of explosive. Granted, they get sophisticated in a hurry once you build small efficient special-purpose devices. Still, you could make a cruise missile out of most any common PC, some servos, some sensors, and a small aircraft, and a whole lotta fertilizer. An old Piper Cub would work just fine. For that matter, you could just turn the old Cub into a remote control aircraft and use it to attack any target of your choice within 10 miles of the take-off strip.
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/
The Soviets had the advantage that they could hide their failures and shout their triumphs. At least as many of their rockets blew up on the pad as ours. You don't learn how to build rockets without blowing some up which lesson these small private firms are learning the hard way. So when we have one fail and it's true to this day, there has to be three or four years of investigations and committees and hand-wringing before we can launch anything else. As far as propaganda goes, a flaming rocket sinking into the pad looks just GREAT. The Soviets would just shrug, learn from wreckage if there was anything to be quickly learned, then shoot off the next one.
It wasn't that we couldn't have competed with the Soviets in rocketry earlier, it was largely a matter of emphasis. We put our money and research into smaller more efficient nukes and jet bombers to deliver them. Rather than compete on ground we had been staking out for years, they threw their efforts at rockets which would gain them parity much more quickly.
And yes, believing the Soviets stupid and backward was a mistake. They weren't stupid at any rate and could throw the weight of the entire state into any chosen area they wanted to compete against the West on. As a whole considering consumer goods and their general economy, they WERE more than a bit backward; I never stood in line three hours to get four rolls of East German toliet paper but was nothing backward about anything they considered of strategic importance.
and it's more or less clear that the Republican will lose the next elections.
Ah but you forget that the Dems are the masters when it comes to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. All they have to is nominate Hilary. She'll sweep the primaries but will not prevail against even the biggest douche the Republicans can come up with. I'm not saying a woman can't be president. Someone like Ann Richards would be much less of a guaranteed disaster but Hilary ain't it.That only works on completely anonymous nobodies. TPB is a fairly well known. Said thugs would also have to operate in a foreign country that won't be terribly inclined to leniency if they're caught. I suspect the sort operating the Pirate Bay would love nothing better than to trace and expose something like that. The Purple One is better off sticking to lawyering.
Metallica attacked the PAN newsreader project because it included an mp3 decoder (gasp!) and was being funded at the time by the same VP funding Napster. It was basically a bullshit guilt-by-association thing. The best part was Metallica's attorney asking one of the developers on the stand "How would you like it if someone gave away your work for free on the Internet?" He seemed completely flabbergasted when the rest of the dev team and the developer burst out laughing.
It is customary for newsreaders and other Internet protocol software to use internal and external decoders on file formats. PAN certainly wasn't unique in that regard. Those Metallica dipshits just thought "ZOMG! It's something else that downloads mp3s! Napster BAD!" Their being cool about the live shows doesn't entirely absolve them of the "bad reputation". Attacking the only FOSS project making a decent GUI newsreader at the time definitely put them in the thoughtless jerk category as far as I'm concerned.
That's actually my intent. The package in question is used to write IEPs. For a school district, that is as mission critical as it gets. Having the IEP server consistently take a dump in the middle of IEP season is what made me a major hater of FM Pro. A really gross app at this company I moonlight for hasn't been fun either.
If there is one call I hate to get, it's the one that goes like this, "I have an IEP meeting with the parents in 2 hours and the server gives this table not found error when I went in to print! HELP!!!!" Now imagine getting clusters of those several years in a row. I have hit the point where I am in fact going to develop a LAMP app to do this.
You've also tapped into something I've long suspected about FM Pro. It is RDBMS, widget library, and scripting engine all in one. I believe other database apps gain robustness in all those things being separate modules. It's like an automatic transmission in that trouble in one part spreads to everything else and it is running the thing hot that will do it.
My scalability concerns are a bit more serious than a badly designed table/query structure making the application slow. We have a mission critical third-party app that runs on FM Pro (which I inherited....). During the crunch times when the relevant staff are making heavy and simultaneous use of the app, I've had database corruptions for three years running. Now it may indeed be the case that crappy programming is at fault here (I wouldn't doubt it actually. And yes, we are seeking alternatives. The functionality is difficult to replace.) but the experience hasn't bolstered my confidence in the FM Pro dependency. I've also seen similar behavior from other FM Pro apps.
Given some heavy demonstrations, I may concede that an FM Pro dev who knows what he's doing can build a reliable, robust, and scalable applications. What would still make me a hater is it invites casual development which PHBs are then won't to deploy widely. I see it as an extra shiny Foot Howitzer that begs in a sultry woman's voice "Shoot Me!". In such cases, the worst thing it will do isn't get really slow. It's apt to munch data.
Something like Postgre on the other hand requires at least a journeyman level of competence to even get it to do anything. Things like Access, Postgre, and even MySQL have an inherent bozo filter that weeds out the worst of the poseurs.
If this is the case, why don't FOSS licenses specifically disavow that right. That would be an easy way for the likes of MS to create trouble: buy out important FOSS developers then revoke all licenses. Even if antitrust concerns prevent MS from doing it, it seems quite the nasty sideline for patent troll firms to get into.
Well, that actually is my problem with FileMaker Pro. It too seduces you into thinking that developing database apps are easy and fun. The difference is that when an FM Pro app starts flaking out (public school systems are just eaten up with FM Pro deployments that got too big for their britches) there isn't a "big brother" product to easily transition to that scales.
Yeah it's true that Access is a gateway drug to SQL Server. But that IS a viable upgrade path for that little workgroup app that some PHP decided to expose to a 10,000 node WAN.
WINE is not and I doubt it will ever be a good way of running general random Windows apps. However, it can be targeted as an environment by Windows developers who want a quick and dirty port of an app. If the app is built with WINE in mind and shipped with a (possibly patched) version of WINE targeted then it can work quite well.