No, none of these were hosted on peta.org, they were hosted elsewhere. Obviously, the long arm of PETA and its supporters appears to have reached well beyond peta.org in silencing their critics.
PS: Being originally from a third world country, it is very distressing to see organizations like PETA squander time, energy and money to save rats, cats and monkeys when hundreds of millions of people on this planet are being ravaged by war, hunger, famine, drought, poverty and repressive government.
Even my vegitarian friends (if I have any left after this comment) would agree with you there.
The simple truth is that the notion that being wantonly cruel to animals is wrong, which most of us can agree with, has been perverted into the absurd notion that the life of a chicken holds the same value as the life of a human being. PETA propoganda literature goes so far as to equate the consumption of poultry in this country with the Nazi holocaus ("six million Jews were killed in Germany but a hundred million chickens will parish in the US this year!" or some such) I won't get started on the quality of people I have seen speeking out on behalf of PETA, except to say my opinion of them, and their movement, has gone from an initially high level to very, very low indeed. As you correctly point out, if people are so desperate for a cause to give their empty lives meanings, there are far more urgent problems deserving of attention than the living conditions of pork prior to its harvest.
Hitler was a vegitarian and animal rights activist. Perhaps his ability to equate human life with animal life explains some of the atrocities his regime was responsible for.
Sources too numerous to mention, here are a couple
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Security
Peer review of code yields more pro-active identification of problems
Source availability allows users to create fixes to identified critical security bugs in a more timely manner -- hours rather than days or weeks.
A security paradigm which accounts for multiple users and a network connection from the ground up, rather than a kludge tacked on later as an afterthought
Well behaved user applications which do not open themselves up to trivial attack by default a la' MS Exchange.
User permissions, preventing a user from doing damange to anyone other than themselves should they launch a destructive trojan, or simply run amok deleting everything they can.
Kerberos implimentation which doesn't suffer from deliberate attempts to limit interoperability with other systems
etc.
Robustness (uptimes measurable in years, as opposed to days)
Memory management - when programs write to memory which doesn't belong to them they receive faults and are killed, they do not take the entire OS down. This is not true of windows 95 or 98, or NT when running in compatability mode.
For additional information (there is no shortage on-line, and no reason to belabor the obvious any more here) may I suggest numerous introductory Linux websites, some of which you'll find linked to here and here.
to exist is not to be functional, or even usable
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You wrongly assume I am a Microsoft Apologist. I am more of an outsider who is amused to see Linux lovers and Microsoft apologists fight the bloody fight to defend their ways.
And I, an unashamed Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS enthusiast, always find Linux, FreeBSD, Amiga, Mac, and BeOS enthusiasts to be quite amusing.;-) Don't get me wrong, I respect your enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm of those who enjoy other alternative operating systems (including those which don't interest me personally). None of the alternative OSes is perfect, but all of them have one thing in common: they are better than Windows in nearly every technical respect, and none of them are guilty of having held back progress the computing industry for fifteen years.
Apologists, astroturfers, and zealots supporting MS Window variants, on the other hand, are promoting a technically inferior platform and a parasitical company which has actively and severely harmed computing for as long as I've been in the field. Worse, they promote a culture which replaces technical diversity, individual knowhow and intellectual endeavor with a technical monoculture ("One World, One Web, One Program"[1]) mentality, canned solutions which barely work and often map poorly to the problems they purport to solve, and corporate marketing hype which is often criminally misrepresentative. I don't even want to begin discussing their criminally negligent attitude toward security; that is a topic for another discussion. Suffice it to say, that for all of this I can have absolutely no respect whatsoever.
To the subject at hand: as another pointed out, POSIX is only available for Windows/NT, not 95 or 98 (which comprise the majority of installed systems), and even there it is hidden away (and not installed by default). Worse, it has more than once caused severe headaches after various service packs were applied, and had to be removed. This hardly qualifies as a function product in my opinion.
Unlike Linux, code generated for one variant of windows will very often not work at all on another variant, whereas for Linux most code will work with a simple recompile, 64 vs. 32 bit architectures not withstanding (We do allot of work on both 32-bit Intel and 64-bit alpha Linux platforms where I work).
Actually, I prefer BeOS as an OS. None of the programs for it crash the OS. 'course, there aren't too many programs either!
I like BeOS, but Adamation Personal Studio crashes all the time when I try to make long video captures (from either analog or firewire sources). On occasion, it does take BeOS out with it, and a hard reboot is required. It is a very cool OS, but no where near perfect just yet.:-)
[1]Microsoft Promotional Ad, bearing a striking resemblence to Hitler's "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer" political slogan. Both show a completely malignant attitude toward diversity, be it technical, biological, or cultural.
IDE's a convenient crutch today, a thorn tommorow
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I really don't agree with this. I develop on WinNT using Visual C++ for a cross-platform project on Win32, Irix 6.5, SunOS, and Linux. We don't use cross compilers, but the IDE makes it worth it. Code completion and having the MSDN library is _MUCH_ easier than sifting through man pages.
Your preference for MSDN and code completion over referencing the occasional man page aside, you haven't said anything that addresses the original concern of the post you replied to.
Large projects developed using proprietary IDEs will be difficult if not impossible to manage in another 15 or 20 years (and, as Y2K showed us, the code will need to be managed many years hence). Using industry standard, human readable makefiles may not be as snazzy as running the latest glitzy IDE and project manager, but a developer in 2030 will have little trouble rebuilding the project from the source if need be. The same developer, confronted with a large project developed under Microsoft's IDE, for example (Microsoft isn't the only culprit, there are competing IDEs with the same problem), will find it nigh unto impossible to find a copy of a 20 or 30 year old IDE. Recompiling the project will be next to impossible and very expensive, possibly more expensive than the code is worth.
Now, undoubtably someone will argue that this is doing the hypothetical company and developer a favor, that 30 year old code should be disgarded and rewritten anyway. In some cases perhaps, but in some cases perhaps not. "hello world" isn't going to be any better fundamentally if you retype the code 30 years from now or recompile code written today. In any event, the decision whether to discard or reuse code should be based upon the merits of the code, the time/cost required, etc., not upon the unavailability of some ancient, proprietary IDE needed to rebuild the damn thing.
Restraint may be a prerequisite for racial survival.
In other words, any species capable of surviving long enough to colonize another star may have done so only be learning restraint and respect for diversity: necessary lessons if they are not to destroy the very ecosystem which sustains their existence on the home world, not to mention avoid destroying themselves in petty conflicts.
Such a species would find the notion of exponential growth intolerable: it would wipe out all other cultures and life forms in the galaxy in favor of their own, destroying biological and cultural diversity and, quite possibly, destroying the one species with the necessary insight to survive the next galaxy-wide cataclysm (e.g. 3 billion years from now, when the Milky Way and Andromeda are expected to collide).
While humans are, as a rule, incapable of thinking in such terms and along such time scales, it is likely that a species able to survive sufficiently long to colonize other stars would take such considerations very seriously, and restrain their own growth accordingly.
I realize this might be controversial, but I suggest using a mixture of American and British spelling, and throwing in some olde english, and perhaps "nyew fonetik english" as well, just to give all ye grammar nazis a coronary.
Is there anything funnier or more colourful than a spelling troll or grammar nazi twitching on the ground, lost in the throes of a severe stroke?
Of which the school system in Kansas is a shining example, a school system in which evolution is no longer required to be taught (and hence won't be, as it is considered "controviersial" by the religious right despite mountainous piles of evidence supporting it).
I refer you to the original question that started this thread:
What would the "unindoctrinated" prefer?
In this case defaulting to the familiar serves no useful purpose, except to hide one of the nicest features of X as an alternative to windows. You "and several others" hardly constitute a majority. As for the other 80%, we don't really know what they prefer, as they haven't been given a choice they are aware of, and most will likely never stumble across the possibility of changing the default behavior, or even understand what "focus" means.
Until recently, focus follows mouse was the default for nearly every window manager. It was a very positive way of differentiating between Unix/X and everyone else, an added feature of the GUI that everyone was immediately aware of and, contrary to your assertion, one that most people preferred. I find it disturbing that major distributions have started slighting one of the nicer features of the Linux/UNIX GUI in order to mimic an operating system most of us recognize as inferior. Part of switching to a new OS entails being willing to learn something new. The notion that people should switch transparently and be unaware of the change is IMHO flawed. What shall we get rid of next to mimic windows, logins and multi-user capabilities a la BeOS?[1]
Besides, if you don't like focus-follows-mouse, you can always change it.
[1] BeOS actually hides this, they've gotten rid of the console login, but multi-user capabilities exist for such things as network logins.
This was not the purpose of patents, at least not originally. They were there to promote disclosure.
Interesting. I do not have my copy of the constitution handy (it's at home), but I vaguely recall verbiage about "promoting" progress. In any event, pro-patent arguments almost always revolve around the mistaken notion that without patents there would be no progress, ie we need patents to promote progress. The argument usually goes something like this:
1. No one will invent anything or share their ideas with others unless there is a financial reward. (This is demonstrably wrong, as many "inventors" on the internet have demonstrated, only to have their "inventions" hijacked and patented by others. Such hijackings would be impossible without the US patent office). 2. There can be no financial reward for an invention without the patenting system (this is obviously wrong, inventing and selling a better product will result in financial gain, whether or not you have competition). 3. The patenting system defends the little guy from having his idea "stolen" by a bigger company. (There are two errors in this assumption: one, that ideas are natural property like physical objects and can be "owned", and two, that the system favors the little guy over the large corporate interest. This is demonstrably false: there are numerous historical incidents in which the patent system was used by corporations to "steal" ideas from the inventor -- many of Thomas Edison's patents were thus obtained, as are most corporate patents today. In addition, it can be trivially shown that, when an individual must face off against a corporation in a patent dispute, the corporation has much deeper pockets with which to persue litigation. In a system of justice like that of the US, where justice is basically cash flow, the individual is at a severe disadvantage and will, on average, lose their claim.)
Conclusion: Without the patenting system we would have no progress, and the small inventor whould be at the mercy of the big corporate interest.
The first conclusion is demonstrably false, as can be shown by the rapid progress in computer science which predated software patents, not to mention the numerous inventions which predated the patent system altogether.
The second conclusion is misdirection at its worst: the sad fact is, the individual is as much, if not more, at the mercy of large corporate interests under the existing patent system than they would be without it.
I recently changed my last name from "Liddle" to "Smith" (it's a long story, but basically I reverted the name more or less back to the one I was born with). I did this in April, and I am still wading through institutional (government and corporate) bureacracies trying to get the change put through.
A few forward thinking companies actually let me make the change online (though they did require 128 bit encryption and a password, there are still security issues). On the other hand, I have spent more time on the phone, and standing in line, getting this taken care of than I care to think about.
If I were able to do this on-line, I would have been able to do this in an afternoon, queue jumping or no. As it is, I am hopeful I'll have everything squared away under the new name by the end of the summer. I'm not holding my breath though.
I don't really know why this is so, but I've seen it on _many_ systems. Just try reseting your clocks to normal and see what happens.
Alas, I am not overclocking the CPU. It is a dual Pentium III/550 with 256 MB of RAM, so I haven't really felt the need to overclock.
A colleague of mine, running a single Pentium III/600 has the same problem. We are both using the firewire card sold with the Adamation Personal Studio product and bundled with BeOS 5, so I don't think it is our hardware.
I, for one, much prefer Applix 5.0 over the other office suites, including MS Office and Corel Office. This is quite remarkable, as I didn't care for Applix 4.x much at all (they have switched to GTK and have made many improvements in the GUI design). I find the Applix word processor in particular much less bloated and irritating than wordperfect and word, with their "I'll fix that typo for you" attitude (yes, I know it can be turned off, but the default is more than a little irritating).
It would be interesting to see what completely new, unindoctrinated (from both the windows and alternative OS perspectives) users would prefer. I suspect we'd find that many people end up using windows because their friends do (and/or the perception that there is more software available, when in truth there is only more commercial software available).
On the other hand, I think, despite the fact that the X Window System has come a long way, we'd hear some strong criticisms about aspects of the GUI as well. KDE is slow and unattractive, although KDE 2.0 looks to have improved on both accounts (due out in September I think). Gnome is excellent, but still not easy enough for newbies to use and customize as it should be. Software installation doesn't automatically set up icons/menu items for either, which for a non-techie is an important feature.
One scathing criticism I have personally is the recent trend among window managers toward defaulting to the ugly "click to focus" paradigm (perhaps this is a distribution thing, not a window manager issue, in which case, my criticism is redirected to them). This hides one of the nicest features X has over windows from new users! I remember when I first used X, with twm, on an old Sun box, thinking to myself "God, this is ugly, but I can get so much work done so much faster with this automatic focus and single click cut-and-paste!").
When I gave my mother and sister Linux boxes, the first thing I did was change the default back to the sloppy focus it should have been at to begin with. Contrary to popular myth, it didn't confuse them at all (and I forgot to tell them about it when I did it). On the contrary, it helped in no small part to make them enthusiastic converts, and neither would willingly go back to using windows. But both have made comments similar to mine above -- they'd like it to be easier to add apps, and see those apps visible in their GUI.
Indeed, it uses gnome-print for check printing, and presumably printing other reports as well.
I've run older 1.3 versions of GnuCash under a bunch of different window managers, including enlightenment, icewm, windowmaker, and kwm. You need to have the gnome librarys installed, including the "development" libraries (headers, etc.) if you're compiling GnuCash from source. Other than that you really don't need gnome, although you may want to have some of the gnome utilities around if you're interested in playing around with themes (GnuCash will use gtk/gnome themes, which can improve the aesthetics over the default according to your taste).
I would characterize the stability problems as "slight." I have Be R5 and have tried running it with Adamation Personal Studio, using both an analog Hauppauge card as well as a IEEE 1394 card (which came with the product). I can consistently crash the system and corrupt my video data by trying any number of things, the simplest being to attempt capturing more than 8 minutes of (digital) video source to a (SCSI) hard drive, or more than 25 minutes of analog source.
It is unusable for the one application I purchased it for: non-linear video editing.
As another pointed out, even windows, as crappy as it is, stays up longer. The Linux multi-media is progressing rapidly and becoming very exciting, but it isn't quite there yet. Once it is, I won't look back to either Windows or BeOS.
$500/yr is NOTHING compared to some of the benefits that come from just holding the patent.
Good God!
You're right, $500/year is nothing, especially given that today's standard procedure with patent enforcement is to not enforce the patent for a period of time and encourage people to use it, then surprise everyone years later (when it has become a de-facto standard a la GIF and MP3) with demands for royalties. Obviously, BT had an extra nine years to persue this strategy, with possibly catastrophic results for the internet.
Another example of the patenting system not only being unnecessary for innovation, but downright destructive to the entire innovative process.
It is past time for the patent office to be closed and the entire system to be scrapped.
To all those claiming this is a sign that patent reform is forthcoming are probably right but for the wrong reasons, in 1980 this was probably an original idea/
Looking at the patent, I see that it was granted in 1989, 9 years (!!) after it was filed.
What an obscenety.
What the hell was the patent office doing sitting on this for nine year! If it had been granted in 1980, the patent would have expired in 1997 and this wouldn't even be an issue. Patents have long since outlived their purpose -- the market encourages innovation without government enforced monopolies. I don't know if this particular abuse will lead to reform or not, but even if it does, reforming the patenting system will simply mean tweaking a broken and destructive system such that the net negative effects become tolerable to a majority. It will still be a millstone around our collective neck, perhaps with a few pounds chipped off to appease us but still weighing us all down.
Outright Government (Federal) Censorship (e.g. it is illegal to possess kiddie porn, to publish classified material, etc.)
Outright Government (State and Local) Censorship (e.g. Cincinnati's witch hunt of the Maplethorp exhibit, Larry Flynt, etc.)
Structural Censorship (e.g. Copyright prevents people from publishing another's work without permission, allowing the Church of $cientology to silence many citations of its works by critics, trademark laws restrict how one may refer to a corporate entity, etc.)
Institutional Censorship ("We won't display/print/publish that, it would offend too many, cause a lawsuit, etc.")
Corporate Censorship (threats of lawsuits, often based on dubious claims of trademark or copyright infringement with little or no legal basis, i.e. Legal Thuggary)
Social Censorship ("We don't like your kind around here!")
I've probably missed some other forms of censorship, but you get the idea.
Clearly, there is no technological solution that will solve all of these forms of censorship, and as others have pointed out, no technological solution can substitute for political involvement in preventing these kinds of abuses.
Nevertheless, this sort of thing, coupled with a FreeNet infrastructure, could at least alleviate both Institutional (ISPs) and Corporate Censorship by making it too expensive to persue. It won't win the war, but it could be decisive in a few important battles.
This will suck for everyone except Intel and Rambus.
It will suck for intel too. Higher memory prices, driven by government sponsored monopoly, will both drive down demand for PCs and take capital which would have been spent on faster CPUs and peripherals. This means less computers being sold at higher prices, with slower (read: cheaper) CPUs. A net loss for Intel and everyone else in the industry, with a nice gain for Rambus (but small in terms of the total loss to the industry).
As another pointed out, the time for patents is long past - innovation no longer requires government sponsored monopolies to be worthwhile (indeed, it is arguable that patents ever encouraged innovation which wouldn't have taken place otherwise). The competative market for ever better material goods, coupled with the innate desire for people, particularly engineers, to tinker and gain noteriety for their inventins, is more than adeqaute, and probably always has been.
Given that another has opined that there is a simple, emperical way to determine if something is obsolete (see if anyone uses it, if so, it isn't), which addressed only the first definition of obsolete, posting the definition is an excellent rebuttal and not in the least redundant. (unless you refer to definitions #3 and #4 of redundant and assume redundancy on the part of the slashdot servers, which would make every word ever posted on this forum redundant and becomes a silly excersize in sophistry).
According to the dictionary definition of obsolete, the x86 architecture qualifies, despite Intel apologist arguments to the contrary. It is obsolete hardware which is, alas, still in widespread use. Horses and buggies are obsolete, but you still see them on the roads in Central Illinois and Pennsylvania. This doesn't make them any less obsolete. When the oil is gone, automobiles may well become obsolete while horses and buggies become the pinnacle of technology. Unless, of course, the patents on hydrogen cells the energy cartels are keeping under wraps are finally freed, but thats a diatribe for another day...
But I was under the impression that ANYONE could run a root server (certain qualifications withstanding, of course)
In theory, you could. Alternic tried to do that very thing. Unfortunately, you have to talk the rest of the world into using your root servers, a nearly impossible task these days. If no one looks at your root server, no one uses your maps. Right now, NSI has a monopoly on root servers for the com, net, and org TLDs, so everyone has to pay a vig to NSI.
It is one of the reasons a peer-to-peer, more loosely structured heiarchical service is needed to replace DNS, hopefully for IPv6.
Oh, and just in case, IANANSIE, among other things...
Sorry, my comment was more toung in cheeck, not intended as an actuall accusation. I probably should have inserted the appropriate disclaimer in the original post.
They are using gnutella to distribute digital versions of their movies.
They are grossly overcharging for the privelege, with one viewing priced at $9.95, more than a seat at the cinema.
I think we must consider the possibility that this is a ploy to completely discredit distributed file sharing technologies such as gnutella and, by association, much of the free software / hacker (not cracker) community. They know $9.95 is an unreasonable price, and as others have pointed out this makes it a strong incentive for cracking and unauthorized copying.
Imagine the following testimony, either before congress while lobbying for a new bill, or before the supreme court in upholding a new law banning FreeNet, gnutella, etc. outright:
"We have tried using this technology for distributing our intelletual property, providing users with an easy method of legitimate payment, but recorded only 6 legitamate sales in over 21,000 downloads. We need this legislation to protect our rights -- these people are ruthless vultures and steal from us no matter what we do, or how reasonable we are!"
By cracking and making unauthorized copies of this, you play into their hands. Hell, we're probably playing into their hands simply by not buying their overpriced product "we had zero sales using gnapster - there is no legitimate ecommerce capability there whatsoever."
These people aren't stupid. They are amoral, libelous, monopolistic thugs, but they are not stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
When checking out the PETA Parody Site I tried following numerous links, particularly in the Miscellaneous section. Most don't work at all, including some interesting titles such as The Implications of Nazi Animal Protection, Militant Vegetariansim, and Animal Rights and the New Man Haters.
No, none of these were hosted on peta.org, they were hosted elsewhere. Obviously, the long arm of PETA and its supporters appears to have reached well beyond peta.org in silencing their critics.
PS: Being originally from a third world country, it is very distressing to see organizations like PETA squander time, energy and money to save rats, cats and monkeys when hundreds of millions of people on this planet are being ravaged by war, hunger, famine, drought, poverty and repressive government.
Even my vegitarian friends (if I have any left after this comment) would agree with you there.
The simple truth is that the notion that being wantonly cruel to animals is wrong, which most of us can agree with, has been perverted into the absurd notion that the life of a chicken holds the same value as the life of a human being. PETA propoganda literature goes so far as to equate the consumption of poultry in this country with the Nazi holocaus ("six million Jews were killed in Germany but a hundred million chickens will parish in the US this year!" or some such) I won't get started on the quality of people I have seen speeking out on behalf of PETA, except to say my opinion of them, and their movement, has gone from an initially high level to very, very low indeed. As you correctly point out, if people are so desperate for a cause to give their empty lives meanings, there are far more urgent problems deserving of attention than the living conditions of pork prior to its harvest.
Hitler was a vegitarian and animal rights activist. Perhaps his ability to equate human life with animal life explains some of the atrocities his regime was responsible for.
I refer you to an internal Microsoft memo.
For additional information (there is no shortage on-line, and no reason to belabor the obvious any more here) may I suggest numerous introductory Linux websites, some of which you'll find linked to here and here.
You wrongly assume I am a Microsoft Apologist. I am more of an outsider who is amused to see Linux lovers and Microsoft apologists fight the bloody fight to defend their ways.
;-) Don't get me wrong, I respect your enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm of those who enjoy other alternative operating systems (including those which don't interest me personally). None of the alternative OSes is perfect, but all of them have one thing in common: they are better than Windows in nearly every technical respect, and none of them are guilty of having held back progress the computing industry for fifteen years.
:-)
And I, an unashamed Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS enthusiast, always find Linux, FreeBSD, Amiga, Mac, and BeOS enthusiasts to be quite amusing.
Apologists, astroturfers, and zealots supporting MS Window variants, on the other hand, are promoting a technically inferior platform and a parasitical company which has actively and severely harmed computing for as long as I've been in the field. Worse, they promote a culture which replaces technical diversity, individual knowhow and intellectual endeavor with a technical monoculture ("One World, One Web, One Program"[1]) mentality, canned solutions which barely work and often map poorly to the problems they purport to solve, and corporate marketing hype which is often criminally misrepresentative. I don't even want to begin discussing their criminally negligent attitude toward security; that is a topic for another discussion. Suffice it to say, that for all of this I can have absolutely no respect whatsoever.
To the subject at hand: as another pointed out, POSIX is only available for Windows/NT, not 95 or 98 (which comprise the majority of installed systems), and even there it is hidden away (and not installed by default). Worse, it has more than once caused severe headaches after various service packs were applied, and had to be removed. This hardly qualifies as a function product in my opinion.
Unlike Linux, code generated for one variant of windows will very often not work at all on another variant, whereas for Linux most code will work with a simple recompile, 64 vs. 32 bit architectures not withstanding (We do allot of work on both 32-bit Intel and 64-bit alpha Linux platforms where I work).
Actually, I prefer BeOS as an OS. None of the programs for it crash the OS. 'course, there aren't too many programs either!
I like BeOS, but Adamation Personal Studio crashes all the time when I try to make long video captures (from either analog or firewire sources). On occasion, it does take BeOS out with it, and a hard reboot is required. It is a very cool OS, but no where near perfect just yet.
[1]Microsoft Promotional Ad, bearing a striking resemblence to Hitler's "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer" political slogan. Both show a completely malignant attitude toward diversity, be it technical, biological, or cultural.
I really don't agree with this. I develop on WinNT using Visual C++ for a cross-platform project on Win32, Irix 6.5, SunOS, and Linux. We don't use cross compilers, but the IDE makes it worth it. Code completion and having the MSDN library is _MUCH_ easier than sifting through man pages.
Your preference for MSDN and code completion over referencing the occasional man page aside, you haven't said anything that addresses the original concern of the post you replied to.
Large projects developed using proprietary IDEs will be difficult if not impossible to manage in another 15 or 20 years (and, as Y2K showed us, the code will need to be managed many years hence). Using industry standard, human readable makefiles may not be as snazzy as running the latest glitzy IDE and project manager, but a developer in 2030 will have little trouble rebuilding the project from the source if need be. The same developer, confronted with a large project developed under Microsoft's IDE, for example (Microsoft isn't the only culprit, there are competing IDEs with the same problem), will find it nigh unto impossible to find a copy of a 20 or 30 year old IDE. Recompiling the project will be next to impossible and very expensive, possibly more expensive than the code is worth.
Now, undoubtably someone will argue that this is doing the hypothetical company and developer a favor, that 30 year old code should be disgarded and rewritten anyway. In some cases perhaps, but in some cases perhaps not. "hello world" isn't going to be any better fundamentally if you retype the code 30 years from now or recompile code written today. In any event, the decision whether to discard or reuse code should be based upon the merits of the code, the time/cost required, etc., not upon the unavailability of some ancient, proprietary IDE needed to rebuild the damn thing.
Restraint may be a prerequisite for racial survival.
In other words, any species capable of surviving long enough to colonize another star may have done so only be learning restraint and respect for diversity: necessary lessons if they are not to destroy the very ecosystem which sustains their existence on the home world, not to mention avoid destroying themselves in petty conflicts.
Such a species would find the notion of exponential growth intolerable: it would wipe out all other cultures and life forms in the galaxy in favor of their own, destroying biological and cultural diversity and, quite possibly, destroying the one species with the necessary insight to survive the next galaxy-wide cataclysm (e.g. 3 billion years from now, when the Milky Way and Andromeda are expected to collide).
While humans are, as a rule, incapable of thinking in such terms and along such time scales, it is likely that a species able to survive sufficiently long to colonize other stars would take such considerations very seriously, and restrain their own growth accordingly.
I'm half-tempted to adopt British spelling
I realize this might be controversial, but I suggest using a mixture of American and British spelling, and throwing in some olde english, and perhaps "nyew fonetik english" as well, just to give all ye grammar nazis a coronary.
Is there anything funnier or more colourful than a spelling troll or grammar nazi twitching on the ground, lost in the throes of a severe stroke?
Of which the school system in Kansas is a shining example, a school system in which evolution is no longer required to be taught (and hence won't be, as it is considered "controviersial" by the religious right despite mountainous piles of evidence supporting it).
I refer you to the original question that started this thread:
What would the "unindoctrinated" prefer?
In this case defaulting to the familiar serves no useful purpose, except to hide one of the nicest features of X as an alternative to windows. You "and several others" hardly constitute a majority. As for the other 80%, we don't really know what they prefer, as they haven't been given a choice they are aware of, and most will likely never stumble across the possibility of changing the default behavior, or even understand what "focus" means.
Until recently, focus follows mouse was the default for nearly every window manager. It was a very positive way of differentiating between Unix/X and everyone else, an added feature of the GUI that everyone was immediately aware of and, contrary to your assertion, one that most people preferred. I find it disturbing that major distributions have started slighting one of the nicer features of the Linux/UNIX GUI in order to mimic an operating system most of us recognize as inferior. Part of switching to a new OS entails being willing to learn something new. The notion that people should switch transparently and be unaware of the change is IMHO flawed. What shall we get rid of next to mimic windows, logins and multi-user capabilities a la BeOS?[1]
Besides, if you don't like focus-follows-mouse, you can always change it.
[1] BeOS actually hides this, they've gotten rid of the console login, but multi-user capabilities exist for such things as network logins.
Willard
This was not the purpose of patents, at least not originally. They were there to promote disclosure.
Interesting. I do not have my copy of the constitution handy (it's at home), but I vaguely recall verbiage about "promoting" progress. In any event, pro-patent arguments almost always revolve around the mistaken notion that without patents there would be no progress, ie we need patents to promote progress. The argument usually goes something like this:
1. No one will invent anything or share their ideas with others unless there is a financial reward. (This is demonstrably wrong, as many "inventors" on the internet have demonstrated, only to have their "inventions" hijacked and patented by others. Such hijackings would be impossible without the US patent office).
2. There can be no financial reward for an invention without the patenting system (this is obviously wrong, inventing and selling a better product will result in financial gain, whether or not you have competition).
3. The patenting system defends the little guy from having his idea "stolen" by a bigger company. (There are two errors in this assumption: one, that ideas are natural property like physical objects and can be "owned", and two, that the system favors the little guy over the large corporate interest. This is demonstrably false: there are numerous historical incidents in which the patent system was used by corporations to "steal" ideas from the inventor -- many of Thomas Edison's patents were thus obtained, as are most corporate patents today. In addition, it can be trivially shown that, when an individual must face off against a corporation in a patent dispute, the corporation has much deeper pockets with which to persue litigation. In a system of justice like that of the US, where justice is basically cash flow, the individual is at a severe disadvantage and will, on average, lose their claim.)
Conclusion: Without the patenting system we would have no progress, and the small inventor whould be at the mercy of the big corporate interest.
The first conclusion is demonstrably false, as can be shown by the rapid progress in computer science which predated software patents, not to mention the numerous inventions which predated the patent system altogether.
The second conclusion is misdirection at its worst: the sad fact is, the individual is as much, if not more, at the mercy of large corporate interests under the existing patent system than they would be without it.
I recently changed my last name from "Liddle" to "Smith" (it's a long story, but basically I reverted the name more or less back to the one I was born with). I did this in April, and I am still wading through institutional (government and corporate) bureacracies trying to get the change put through.
A few forward thinking companies actually let me make the change online (though they did require 128 bit encryption and a password, there are still security issues). On the other hand, I have spent more time on the phone, and standing in line, getting this taken care of than I care to think about.
If I were able to do this on-line, I would have been able to do this in an afternoon, queue jumping or no. As it is, I am hopeful I'll have everything squared away under the new name by the end of the summer. I'm not holding my breath though.
I don't really know why this is so, but I've seen it on _many_ systems. Just try reseting your clocks to normal and see what happens.
Alas, I am not overclocking the CPU. It is a dual Pentium III/550 with 256 MB of RAM, so I haven't really felt the need to overclock.
A colleague of mine, running a single Pentium III/600 has the same problem. We are both using the firewire card sold with the Adamation Personal Studio product and bundled with BeOS 5, so I don't think it is our hardware.
Interesting question!
I, for one, much prefer Applix 5.0 over the other office suites, including MS Office and Corel Office. This is quite remarkable, as I didn't care for Applix 4.x much at all (they have switched to GTK and have made many improvements in the GUI design). I find the Applix word processor in particular much less bloated and irritating than wordperfect and word, with their "I'll fix that typo for you" attitude (yes, I know it can be turned off, but the default is more than a little irritating).
It would be interesting to see what completely new, unindoctrinated (from both the windows and alternative OS perspectives) users would prefer. I suspect we'd find that many people end up using windows because their friends do (and/or the perception that there is more software available, when in truth there is only more commercial software available).
On the other hand, I think, despite the fact that the X Window System has come a long way, we'd hear some strong criticisms about aspects of the GUI as well. KDE is slow and unattractive, although KDE 2.0 looks to have improved on both accounts (due out in September I think). Gnome is excellent, but still not easy enough for newbies to use and customize as it should be. Software installation doesn't automatically set up icons/menu items for either, which for a non-techie is an important feature.
One scathing criticism I have personally is the recent trend among window managers toward defaulting to the ugly "click to focus" paradigm (perhaps this is a distribution thing, not a window manager issue, in which case, my criticism is redirected to them). This hides one of the nicest features X has over windows from new users! I remember when I first used X, with twm, on an old Sun box, thinking to myself "God, this is ugly, but I can get so much work done so much faster with this automatic focus and single click cut-and-paste!").
When I gave my mother and sister Linux boxes, the first thing I did was change the default back to the sloppy focus it should have been at to begin with. Contrary to popular myth, it didn't confuse them at all (and I forgot to tell them about it when I did it). On the contrary, it helped in no small part to make them enthusiastic converts, and neither would willingly go back to using windows. But both have made comments similar to mine above -- they'd like it to be easier to add apps, and see those apps visible in their GUI.
Perhaps it relys on gnome-print...
Indeed, it uses gnome-print for check printing, and presumably printing other reports as well.
I've run older 1.3 versions of GnuCash under a bunch of different window managers, including enlightenment, icewm, windowmaker, and kwm. You need to have the gnome librarys installed, including the "development" libraries (headers, etc.) if you're compiling GnuCash from source. Other than that you really don't need gnome, although you may want to have some of the gnome utilities around if you're interested in playing around with themes (GnuCash will use gtk/gnome themes, which can improve the aesthetics over the default according to your taste).
ARGH!! How could I miss this in proof reading.
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I would characterize
should, of course, read I wouldn't characterize the stability problems as "slight."
R5PE does seem to have slight stability problems.
I would characterize the stability problems as "slight." I have Be R5 and have tried running it with Adamation Personal Studio, using both an analog Hauppauge card as well as a IEEE 1394 card (which came with the product). I can consistently crash the system and corrupt my video data by trying any number of things, the simplest being to attempt capturing more than 8 minutes of (digital) video source to a (SCSI) hard drive, or more than 25 minutes of analog source.
It is unusable for the one application I purchased it for: non-linear video editing.
As another pointed out, even windows, as crappy as it is, stays up longer. The Linux multi-media is progressing rapidly and becoming very exciting, but it isn't quite there yet. Once it is, I won't look back to either Windows or BeOS.
$500/yr is NOTHING compared to some of the benefits that come from just holding the patent.
Good God!
You're right, $500/year is nothing, especially given that today's standard procedure with patent enforcement is to not enforce the patent for a period of time and encourage people to use it, then surprise everyone years later (when it has become a de-facto standard a la GIF and MP3) with demands for royalties. Obviously, BT had an extra nine years to persue this strategy, with possibly catastrophic results for the internet.
Another example of the patenting system not only being unnecessary for innovation, but downright destructive to the entire innovative process.
It is past time for the patent office to be closed and the entire system to be scrapped.
To all those claiming this is a sign that patent reform is forthcoming are probably right but for the wrong reasons, in 1980 this was probably an original idea/
Looking at the patent, I see that it was granted in 1989, 9 years (!!) after it was filed.
What an obscenety.
What the hell was the patent office doing sitting on this for nine year! If it had been granted in 1980, the patent would have expired in 1997 and this wouldn't even be an issue. Patents have long since outlived their purpose -- the market encourages innovation without government enforced monopolies. I don't know if this particular abuse will lead to reform or not, but even if it does, reforming the patenting system will simply mean tweaking a broken and destructive system such that the net negative effects become tolerable to a majority. It will still be a millstone around our collective neck, perhaps with a few pounds chipped off to appease us but still weighing us all down.
There is more than one kind of censorship:
I've probably missed some other forms of censorship, but you get the idea.
Clearly, there is no technological solution that will solve all of these forms of censorship, and as others have pointed out, no technological solution can substitute for political involvement in preventing these kinds of abuses.
Nevertheless, this sort of thing, coupled with a FreeNet infrastructure, could at least alleviate both Institutional (ISPs) and Corporate Censorship by making it too expensive to persue. It won't win the war, but it could be decisive in a few important battles.
This will suck for everyone except Intel and Rambus.
It will suck for intel too. Higher memory prices, driven by government sponsored monopoly, will both drive down demand for PCs and take capital which would have been spent on faster CPUs and peripherals. This means less computers being sold at higher prices, with slower (read: cheaper) CPUs. A net loss for Intel and everyone else in the industry, with a nice gain for Rambus (but small in terms of the total loss to the industry).
As another pointed out, the time for patents is long past - innovation no longer requires government sponsored monopolies to be worthwhile (indeed, it is arguable that patents ever encouraged innovation which wouldn't have taken place otherwise). The competative market for ever better material goods, coupled with the innate desire for people, particularly engineers, to tinker and gain noteriety for their inventins, is more than adeqaute, and probably always has been.
I think a judge would probably toss a suit against Gnutella and Freenet out on its ass - it's "bad people", not bad technology.
Excellent analogy! I hope to hell you are right, but alas, I lack your faith in our justice system, and have even less for our lawmaking bodies.
I think that your use of obsolete is redundant.
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Given that another has opined that there is a simple, emperical way to determine if something is obsolete (see if anyone uses it, if so, it isn't), which addressed only the first definition of obsolete, posting the definition is an excellent rebuttal and not in the least redundant. (unless you refer to definitions #3 and #4 of redundant and assume redundancy on the part of the slashdot servers, which would make every word ever posted on this forum redundant and becomes a silly excersize in sophistry).
According to the dictionary definition of obsolete, the x86 architecture qualifies, despite Intel apologist arguments to the contrary. It is obsolete hardware which is, alas, still in widespread use. Horses and buggies are obsolete, but you still see them on the roads in Central Illinois and Pennsylvania. This doesn't make them any less obsolete. When the oil is gone, automobiles may well become obsolete while horses and buggies become the pinnacle of technology. Unless, of course, the patents on hydrogen cells the energy cartels are keeping under wraps are finally freed, but thats a diatribe for another day
But I was under the impression that ANYONE could run a root server (certain qualifications withstanding, of course)
In theory, you could. Alternic tried to do that very thing. Unfortunately, you have to talk the rest of the world into using your root servers, a nearly impossible task these days. If no one looks at your root server, no one uses your maps. Right now, NSI has a monopoly on root servers for the com, net, and org TLDs, so everyone has to pay a vig to NSI.
It is one of the reasons a peer-to-peer, more loosely structured heiarchical service is needed to replace DNS, hopefully for IPv6.
Oh, and just in case, IANANSIE, among other things...
Sorry, my comment was more toung in cheeck, not intended as an actuall accusation. I probably should have inserted the appropriate disclaimer in the original post.
Come on, people.
They are using gnutella to distribute digital versions of their movies.
They are grossly overcharging for the privelege, with one viewing priced at $9.95, more than a seat at the cinema.
I think we must consider the possibility that this is a ploy to completely discredit distributed file sharing technologies such as gnutella and, by association, much of the free software / hacker (not cracker) community. They know $9.95 is an unreasonable price, and as others have pointed out this makes it a strong incentive for cracking and unauthorized copying.
Imagine the following testimony, either before congress while lobbying for a new bill, or before the supreme court in upholding a new law banning FreeNet, gnutella, etc. outright:
"We have tried using this technology for distributing our intelletual property, providing users with an easy method of legitimate payment, but recorded only 6 legitamate sales in over 21,000 downloads. We need this legislation to protect our rights -- these people are ruthless vultures and steal from us no matter what we do, or how reasonable we are!"
By cracking and making unauthorized copies of this, you play into their hands. Hell, we're probably playing into their hands simply by not buying their overpriced product "we had zero sales using gnapster - there is no legitimate ecommerce capability there whatsoever."
These people aren't stupid. They are amoral, libelous, monopolistic thugs, but they are not stupid.