Linux at 10 was way ahead of Windows from Microsoft at age 10. http://www.computerhope.com/history/windows.htm 3 years in development + 7 years after its' introduction, Microsoft was just introducing Windows 3.0. I remember buying that piece of shit. The ONLY good thing about it was that it was easy to uninstall.
While this is true, the reason for Linux's quick progress was merely superior design; also, Linux could not have been made without the GNU components which were started some time before 1984, when RMS posted the GNU Manifesto.
Microsoft's operating systems have been low-quality because they were forced to maintain compatibility with their legacy systems, which had relatively shoddy design (indeed, this compatibility was their only selling point). Linux did not have this burden; it needed only source-level compatibility with Unix (still an unfortunate burden, but much less significant). Under Microsoft's same burden (though also starting from scratch), WINE has been consistently behind Microsoft. ReactOS may materialize, but it is not progressing with impressive speed -- although the comparison is probably unfair, because not much effort is going into it, relatively speaking.
I do not use proprietary software personally, except (when I have no control over the system) to use putty or ssh to connect to other systems, but I have seen Windows XP, and read something of its design, and there is no doubting it: Windows is catching up. In five years, I imagine Windows will be the technical equal of GNU/Linux. It is already superior in a number of ways. It will still cost more, which will be Linux's selling point; and it will still be proprietary, which is why I will not use it. But I think it is self-deluded to suppose that Microsoft cannot produce as technically good a product as free software, now that it has finally got over its backwards-compatibility burden.
There is an interesting parallel, I think, between MS Office vs. OpenOffice and Linux vs. XP. MS Office is obviously superior, yet OpenOffice is nevertheless good enough, and progressing faster owing simply to the fact that it has more room to improve. Meanwhile, Linux is somewhat superior to XP, but XP is also quite clearly good enough. Frankly, there's not much further to go on either side. A point of rapidly diminishing returns has been reached (with XP for Windows, and many versions ago for Linux). Application support is the vital factor now.
I feel I should also mention that Linux is not as superior as many would like to think. Plan9 is an obviously superior Unix (which, unlike GNU, has a valid claim at not being Unix), and EROS demonstrates the folly of any Unix-like design at all. Mac OS X also deserves a mention -- it is on the whole technically better than Linux, though less so than Plan9. And as far as implementation goes, each of the three free BSD's have bested Linux on a number of fronts. In particular, the free BSD kernels were always very stable, whereas Linux, for many years, was stable only in comparison to Windows.
That's not how paypal works. When Paypal receives a chargeback, they deduct it from the account of the individual who received the payment. If that's empty and he has a bank account on file, they will deduct it from there. If he has a credit card on file, they will deduct it from there. If these don't work they will go through a collection agency.
2. The folks at LokiTorrent want to exercise that right. In order to do so they need financial assistancec.
In order to exercise that "right", one needs financial assistance? How is that a "right"? Is this a troll?
How one could be "darned proud" of our judicial system is simply beyond me. Our court system, which supposedly provides everyone a "right" to a trial, would collapse overnight if even 50% of defendants attempted to exercise this "right".
In reality, a law suit is a negotiation between two parties, and a trial results only when both parties are equally matched in power (or anyway one party believes they are). The very notion of it is a sham.
I suppose we'll have to simply agree to disagree here -- but IMHO, the lifeblood of our nation's economic system DEMANDS that people building superior products (and offering superior services) be free to earn as much money as they can make. (That includes the consumer feeling free to spend his/her money on said products and services.)
You have completely missed the point. If slaves are used to manufacture a superior product, its superiority does not make its means of manufacture less exploitative.
A capitalist economy is built around the premise of competition. Apple's business strategy is fundamentally at odds with this economic model -- their strategy is based to the core around monopoly. This monopoly is not complete, but that only means it is less successfully exploitative -- not less exploitative.
Apple hardware does not need to be superior to succeed -- in fact, in terms of price performance it is massively inferior. It succeeds owing to monopoly. Our economic system would collapse if all industries supported the type of monopoly tactics that are available to proprietary software vendors. (The retail market is open to similar exploitation, and the results are becoming progressively more devastating).
I fully agree that large companies (Microsoft being one of the top offenders) often end up making less than ethical business decisions.
This is not a matter of business decisions or even strategy, but of the fundamental business model. Apple makes money by using software to create a hardware monopoly. That is their business model. Without the hardware monopoly, they could not be profitable.
The right way for a "free country" to handle this is to address the specific issues, without tossing out the "baby with the bathwater". Microsft deserves legal punishment for specific laws they break, when and if they break them. Same goes for Apple or anyone else.
They aren't breaking the law. However, there is absolutely no reason, in a free market, to allow certain corporations to withhold the information necessary to allow any competing products to be created. Doing so allows them to make more money, but at the expense of everything that is good about a free market.
If I wanted to invest $10M into making a much-improved version of Mac OS X, or Windows XP, this would simply be illegal. Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft, respectively, are free to do such things. This is not free competition in any meaningful sense. The consumer does not have a free choice of who will patch bugs in his operating system, etc. This is not a free market.
Free markets work for commodities. Free markets don't work for monopolies, because in a monopoly there is no market -- there is one supplier. Allowing this one supplier to be free does not provide any of the benefits of allowing an entire market of suppliers to be free.
That doesn't mean consumers should feel "guilty" for buying their products. Several of my personal friends held jobs at Microsoft, including one guy who raised and supported his entire family by helping write software for them. I fail to see what's so inherently "evil" about that!
That can be said about any corporation, any government, or any army.
please, tell me this? Why would you think "Slashdotters" wouldn't/shouldn't like Apple in the first place, considering the size and relative diversity of this "community"?
Almost nobody who understands the business model of a proprietary software vendor (e.g., Microsoft) considers this model to be anything but evil -- the exceptions are mostly neo-liberal assholes*. Slashdot is special in that a good portion of its denizens do understand this business model (a small but influential portion). This is ironic because Slashdot's business model is not dissimilar, at least in terms of economics, but Slashdot is not comparable for other reasons.
Apple's business model is not less evil than Microsoft's, but they do less evil because they have less power. They also produce a far superior product, and this is why slashdotters, capable of recognizing it, flock to them. However, making a superior product does not excuse evil. Your argument is therefore entirely moot. Microsoft's product is only getting better, and I think it is reasonable to expect it to be the technical equal of GNU/Linux within the next few years. They will still be evil, though, and not worthy of support. Buying from Microsoft -- or even Apple -- is like crossing a picket line. Viewed in isolation, it's a fair trade, labor for wages, money for software. Viewed from a global perspective, it only gives power to a group that will use it for exploitation -- including the exploitation of the individual who believes he benefits. Thus, even if Apple or Microsoft produces a superior product, and even if you apparently benefit from buying it, in the end you detriment the world of software users as a whole.
Now I will be concrete. It is because of people like you that I cannot play quicktime movies. Cut it out, jerkface.
* Not all neo-liberals are assholes, and not all neo-liberal assholes are pro-Microsoft. But all pro-Microsoft neo-liberals are assholes.
It depends on whether you talk to someone who knows what the terms mean, or someone who doesn't.
Open Source is a registered trademark, which has a legally-binding definition that includes GPL. You may not legally say that GPL is not Open Source*. The Free Software Foundation has made it very clear that its definition of free software includes BSD-licensing, and in fact the FSF was involved in modifying the original BSD license to achieve this goal. Any usage of "Open Source" or "Free Software" to make a distinction between GPL-style and BSD-style licensing is simply incorrect.
Apple's development tools are free. Visual Studio.NET, last time I checked, had a hefty price tag.
Don't think that this is owing to Apple's charitable nature. Apple can't make money selling development tools because there's much less market selling software for Apple platforms -- whatever they would be make would not be worth the cost of discouraging development for their platform. Note that Microsoft, in its kind benevolence, similarly distributes Internet Explorer free of charge to all who purchase Windows.
Apple, like Microsoft, is as evil as it can be, but no eviler. Sorenson, price-gouging on a monopoly hardware platform, selling Netscape out to Microsoft in exchange for Office (and then bragging about Konqueror, my god!) -- Apple is not the moral corporation that the geek department of its PR strategy would have you believe. They just don't have as many monopoly advantages to exploit.
Apple is not our friend. You might like their fancy computers and software, but never forget that they are a proprietary hardware and software company.
Since when is "friend" defined as non-commercial? Also are you incapable of having friends that do not share your religion? Most of us are not that narrow minded.
My friends will gladly give me a copy of whatever software they write, with source (in fact sometimes they insist I read it, just to show off -- but that's another issue). My friends do not keep secrets from me when it gives them a monopoly advantage, and they don't try to use whatever advantage they might have to exploit me for money. Sometimes I'll buy something from a friend, and when I do, he'll never charge me twice its cost, even if I can't get the thing from anyone else.
ucLinux (microLinux) is a version of Linux designed specifically for embedded applications. Linux is pretty light-weight anyway, but ucLinux can run on a 286. What would you recommend as free alternative? There aren't many, and kernel performance seems to be perfectly sufficient here. (Note that the machine sports a corpulent 32MB of RAM).
I have the original too (or anyway, and older one). While the mouse still works fine after a year, the keyboard became progressively more prone to drop keystrokes after about a month and is now completely unusable. I'll not be getting any more hardware from this company -- and it's not the only company offering a gyroscope mouse, either.
There is a difference between integration with the OS and loading on startup. It is easy to make Firefox -- or any other application -- load on startup, just like IE (for example, QuickTime quite rudely does this by default). IE is integrated with the OS (or, more accurately, the UI) in the sense that the entire file management, start menu, and desktop functionality is done through IE, much in the same way Konqueror is integrated into KDE.
Note that, contrary to popular myth, it is not actually (currently) integrated with the OS _kernel_ or allowed access to secret kernel interfaces, etc. Microsoft has used these sorts of tricks in the past, but in 2000/XP that would just cause them problems, both legal and technical. Special kernel rights give you performance at the expense of kernel reliability, and today the former is almost irrelevant.
Besides, what would be the point? MSIE had already killed Netscape by Win98, after which Microsoft had no competition to cheat against. Even today, while Firefox poses a threat to IE, that is no threat at all -- IE is free, providing no revenue to Microsoft. Netscape's threat was platform-independent computing as the future of the entire software industry, and the Firefox folks do not have such ambitions, XUL notwithstanding.
If it weren't for the PR disaster that would result, Microsoft could profitably remove IE from Windows and bundle Firefox in its place. IE is no longer an important part of their general strategy for OS dominance. It was only ever a defensive move, anyway.
The Waco "cult members" did NOT initiate force; that is why they (the survivors) were wholly acquitted in the subsequent jury trial for murder. The FBI initiated force, and the "cult members" merely acted in self-defense.
This was all video-taped; you can watch the unprovoked FBI shooting at the "cult members" in the documentary "Waco: Rules of Engagement", which presents much of the same evidence which resulted in the aforementioned acquittal.
Re:Why not some mainstream fallacies?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
I'd hardly call something where the evidence is inconclusive to be a fallacy. A fallacy is something that can be shown to be untrue.
That is a fallacy. For example:
Socrates was a man;
All men are mortal;
Therefore Socrates is dead.
That is a fallacy. But its conclusion is true. A fallacy is just an invalid argument. You can construct an invalid argument in favor of any truth. This is important, because people make this mistake commonly: the failure of an argument does not provide any support whatever to the contrary of its conclusion.
If acting required that much talent, there would be no room for nepotism in hiring practices, yet Hollywood, mainstream music, and politics are filled with it. For comparison, there is absolutely no nepotism in sports, because there is such strict competition on talent that selection by any other means would mean sacrificing talent. In Hollywood there is an abundance of talent. Tom Cruise is expensive because he's popular, but hundreds of people could have taken his place and become just as popular. They didn't, so they're not expensive, but that doesn't change the fact of the matter. Fame is something of a natural monopoly, that's all.
Well practically speaking an automated taxi would be sure to have a camera and to identify passengers before allowing entry. (Which is rather unfortunate -- it would potentially become completely impossible to live underground).
First, in congested traffic autonomous vehicles will be able to drive much faster at closer distances than self-driven vehicles.
More importantly, autonomous taxis will end the need of individuals to own cars, vastly reduce the number of cars necessary to society, and indeed end the need for highways. All parking problems would also be solved, because the few cars that would need to be parked (mainly at night) would not need to park near their users. The autonomous taxi will be cheaper to use than a car is to own, because cars are only actually necessary at the end-points of travel where public transport is unavailable; the overhead of constantly moving the cars along with the users even between points public transport handles will avoided (and thus also its cost). This is the primary cost of most car ownership. This overhead is only currently necessary because there is no car available at the end-point of public transport except an expensive taxi -- only more expensive now because of its driver.
Public transport would also be more accessible to those driving to the train stations, because the cars could take themselves out of the way of other drivers without parking in walking distance. Even owners of cars would be able to benefit from public transport, if only to avoid traffic in the daily commute.
Frankly this is murder 2 (depraved indifference towards human life). Had a parent used similar punishment with a child, he or she would certainly be so-convicted (moreover, I imagine there is case history to demonstrate the point).
The article also states that 70% of inmates in Arpaio's jail are merely awaiting trial.
3. Death of Personality- this one comes from Babylon 5, where a sort of chemical amnesia is induced in the criminal. They aren't allowed to know their former life- and their present one is as a slave to the family of their victims, with all wages earned going to restitution.
This won't work in the U.S. -- usually there aren't any victims.
"Innocent until proven guilty" applies in court, not to law enforcement. It has to do with the burden of proof, not the treatment of the accused. The accused are -treated- as guilty until acquitted, as standard procedure -- and this is considered legal and constitutional. The accused are placed in jails with the convicted and are often sentenced to "time served", meaning the punishment for the crime was exacted before the verdict was even determined -- and this is considered legal and constitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
but you wouldn't be the first. My cable ISP does this.
Microsoft's operating systems have been low-quality because they were forced to maintain compatibility with their legacy systems, which had relatively shoddy design (indeed, this compatibility was their only selling point). Linux did not have this burden; it needed only source-level compatibility with Unix (still an unfortunate burden, but much less significant). Under Microsoft's same burden (though also starting from scratch), WINE has been consistently behind Microsoft. ReactOS may materialize, but it is not progressing with impressive speed -- although the comparison is probably unfair, because not much effort is going into it, relatively speaking.
I do not use proprietary software personally, except (when I have no control over the system) to use putty or ssh to connect to other systems, but I have seen Windows XP, and read something of its design, and there is no doubting it: Windows is catching up. In five years, I imagine Windows will be the technical equal of GNU/Linux. It is already superior in a number of ways. It will still cost more, which will be Linux's selling point; and it will still be proprietary, which is why I will not use it. But I think it is self-deluded to suppose that Microsoft cannot produce as technically good a product as free software, now that it has finally got over its backwards-compatibility burden.
There is an interesting parallel, I think, between MS Office vs. OpenOffice and Linux vs. XP. MS Office is obviously superior, yet OpenOffice is nevertheless good enough, and progressing faster owing simply to the fact that it has more room to improve. Meanwhile, Linux is somewhat superior to XP, but XP is also quite clearly good enough. Frankly, there's not much further to go on either side. A point of rapidly diminishing returns has been reached (with XP for Windows, and many versions ago for Linux). Application support is the vital factor now.
I feel I should also mention that Linux is not as superior as many would like to think. Plan9 is an obviously superior Unix (which, unlike GNU, has a valid claim at not being Unix), and EROS demonstrates the folly of any Unix-like design at all. Mac OS X also deserves a mention -- it is on the whole technically better than Linux, though less so than Plan9. And as far as implementation goes, each of the three free BSD's have bested Linux on a number of fronts. In particular, the free BSD kernels were always very stable, whereas Linux, for many years, was stable only in comparison to Windows.
That's not how paypal works. When Paypal receives a chargeback, they deduct it from the account of the individual who received the payment. If that's empty and he has a bank account on file, they will deduct it from there. If he has a credit card on file, they will deduct it from there. If these don't work they will go through a collection agency.
How one could be "darned proud" of our judicial system is simply beyond me. Our court system, which supposedly provides everyone a "right" to a trial, would collapse overnight if even 50% of defendants attempted to exercise this "right".
In reality, a law suit is a negotiation between two parties, and a trial results only when both parties are equally matched in power (or anyway one party believes they are). The very notion of it is a sham.
A capitalist economy is built around the premise of competition. Apple's business strategy is fundamentally at odds with this economic model -- their strategy is based to the core around monopoly. This monopoly is not complete, but that only means it is less successfully exploitative -- not less exploitative.
Apple hardware does not need to be superior to succeed -- in fact, in terms of price performance it is massively inferior. It succeeds owing to monopoly. Our economic system would collapse if all industries supported the type of monopoly tactics that are available to proprietary software vendors. (The retail market is open to similar exploitation, and the results are becoming progressively more devastating).
This is not a matter of business decisions or even strategy, but of the fundamental business model. Apple makes money by using software to create a hardware monopoly. That is their business model. Without the hardware monopoly, they could not be profitable. They aren't breaking the law. However, there is absolutely no reason, in a free market, to allow certain corporations to withhold the information necessary to allow any competing products to be created. Doing so allows them to make more money, but at the expense of everything that is good about a free market.If I wanted to invest $10M into making a much-improved version of Mac OS X, or Windows XP, this would simply be illegal. Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft, respectively, are free to do such things. This is not free competition in any meaningful sense. The consumer does not have a free choice of who will patch bugs in his operating system, etc. This is not a free market.
Free markets work for commodities. Free markets don't work for monopolies, because in a monopoly there is no market -- there is one supplier. Allowing this one supplier to be free does not provide any of the benefits of allowing an entire market of suppliers to be free.
That can be said about any corporation, any government, or any army.Almost nobody who understands the business model of a proprietary software vendor (e.g., Microsoft) considers this model to be anything but evil -- the exceptions are mostly neo-liberal assholes*. Slashdot is special in that a good portion of its denizens do understand this business model (a small but influential portion). This is ironic because Slashdot's business model is not dissimilar, at least in terms of economics, but Slashdot is not comparable for other reasons.
Apple's business model is not less evil than Microsoft's, but they do less evil because they have less power. They also produce a far superior product, and this is why slashdotters, capable of recognizing it, flock to them. However, making a superior product does not excuse evil. Your argument is therefore entirely moot. Microsoft's product is only getting better, and I think it is reasonable to expect it to be the technical equal of GNU/Linux within the next few years. They will still be evil, though, and not worthy of support. Buying from Microsoft -- or even Apple -- is like crossing a picket line. Viewed in isolation, it's a fair trade, labor for wages, money for software. Viewed from a global perspective, it only gives power to a group that will use it for exploitation -- including the exploitation of the individual who believes he benefits. Thus, even if Apple or Microsoft produces a superior product, and even if you apparently benefit from buying it, in the end you detriment the world of software users as a whole.
Now I will be concrete. It is because of people like you that I cannot play quicktime movies. Cut it out, jerkface.
* Not all neo-liberals are assholes, and not all neo-liberal assholes are pro-Microsoft. But all pro-Microsoft neo-liberals are assholes.
Open Source is a registered trademark, which has a legally-binding definition that includes GPL. You may not legally say that GPL is not Open Source*. The Free Software Foundation has made it very clear that its definition of free software includes BSD-licensing, and in fact the FSF was involved in modifying the original BSD license to achieve this goal. Any usage of "Open Source" or "Free Software" to make a distinction between GPL-style and BSD-style licensing is simply incorrect.
* I know this sounds absurd, but it is true.
Apple, like Microsoft, is as evil as it can be, but no eviler. Sorenson, price-gouging on a monopoly hardware platform, selling Netscape out to Microsoft in exchange for Office (and then bragging about Konqueror, my god!) -- Apple is not the moral corporation that the geek department of its PR strategy would have you believe. They just don't have as many monopoly advantages to exploit.
Apple is not my friend.
ucLinux (microLinux) is a version of Linux designed specifically for embedded applications. Linux is pretty light-weight anyway, but ucLinux can run on a 286. What would you recommend as free alternative? There aren't many, and kernel performance seems to be perfectly sufficient here. (Note that the machine sports a corpulent 32MB of RAM).
OK, I guess it's theoretically possible, but iPodLinux uses the Linux framebuffer device, which the free BSD unixes do not have.
I have the original too (or anyway, and older one). While the mouse still works fine after a year, the keyboard became progressively more prone to drop keystrokes after about a month and is now completely unusable. I'll not be getting any more hardware from this company -- and it's not the only company offering a gyroscope mouse, either.
No. They are both free software, and they are both open source.
possibly just ignorance, but in any case, GPL vs. BSD and free vs. open source are completely orthogonal.
There is a difference between integration with the OS and loading on startup. It is easy to make Firefox -- or any other application -- load on startup, just like IE (for example, QuickTime quite rudely does this by default). IE is integrated with the OS (or, more accurately, the UI) in the sense that the entire file management, start menu, and desktop functionality is done through IE, much in the same way Konqueror is integrated into KDE.
Note that, contrary to popular myth, it is not actually (currently) integrated with the OS _kernel_ or allowed access to secret kernel interfaces, etc. Microsoft has used these sorts of tricks in the past, but in 2000/XP that would just cause them problems, both legal and technical. Special kernel rights give you performance at the expense of kernel reliability, and today the former is almost irrelevant.
Besides, what would be the point? MSIE had already killed Netscape by Win98, after which Microsoft had no competition to cheat against. Even today, while Firefox poses a threat to IE, that is no threat at all -- IE is free, providing no revenue to Microsoft. Netscape's threat was platform-independent computing as the future of the entire software industry, and the Firefox folks do not have such ambitions, XUL notwithstanding.
If it weren't for the PR disaster that would result, Microsoft could profitably remove IE from Windows and bundle Firefox in its place. IE is no longer an important part of their general strategy for OS dominance. It was only ever a defensive move, anyway.
The Waco "cult members" did NOT initiate force; that is why they (the survivors) were wholly acquitted in the subsequent jury trial for murder. The FBI initiated force, and the "cult members" merely acted in self-defense.
This was all video-taped; you can watch the unprovoked FBI shooting at the "cult members" in the documentary "Waco: Rules of Engagement", which presents much of the same evidence which resulted in the aforementioned acquittal.
Socrates was a man;
All men are mortal;
Therefore Socrates is dead.
That is a fallacy. But its conclusion is true. A fallacy is just an invalid argument. You can construct an invalid argument in favor of any truth. This is important, because people make this mistake commonly: the failure of an argument does not provide any support whatever to the contrary of its conclusion.
If acting required that much talent, there would be no room for nepotism in hiring practices, yet Hollywood, mainstream music, and politics are filled with it. For comparison, there is absolutely no nepotism in sports, because there is such strict competition on talent that selection by any other means would mean sacrificing talent. In Hollywood there is an abundance of talent. Tom Cruise is expensive because he's popular, but hundreds of people could have taken his place and become just as popular. They didn't, so they're not expensive, but that doesn't change the fact of the matter. Fame is something of a natural monopoly, that's all.
Well practically speaking an automated taxi would be sure to have a camera and to identify passengers before allowing entry. (Which is rather unfortunate -- it would potentially become completely impossible to live underground).
First, in congested traffic autonomous vehicles will be able to drive
much faster at closer distances than self-driven vehicles.
More importantly, autonomous taxis will end the need of individuals to
own cars, vastly reduce the number of cars necessary to society, and
indeed end the need for highways. All parking problems would also be
solved, because the few cars that would need to be parked (mainly at
night) would not need to park near their users. The autonomous taxi
will be cheaper to use than a car is to own, because cars are only
actually necessary at the end-points of travel where public transport
is unavailable; the overhead of constantly moving the cars along with
the users even between points public transport handles will avoided (and
thus also its cost). This is the primary cost of most car ownership.
This overhead is only currently necessary because there is no car
available at the end-point of public transport except an expensive taxi
-- only more expensive now because of its driver.
Public transport would also be more accessible to those driving to the
train stations, because the cars could take themselves out of the way of
other drivers without parking in walking distance. Even owners of cars
would be able to benefit from public transport, if only to avoid traffic
in the daily commute.
Shipping would also be much cheaper.
Frankly this is murder 2 (depraved indifference towards human life). Had a parent used similar punishment with a child, he or she would certainly be so-convicted (moreover, I imagine there is case history to demonstrate the point).
The article also states that 70% of inmates in Arpaio's jail are merely awaiting trial.
"Innocent until proven guilty" applies in court, not to law enforcement. It has to do with the burden of proof, not the treatment of the accused. The accused are -treated- as guilty until acquitted, as standard procedure -- and this is considered legal and constitutional. The accused are placed in jails with the convicted and are often sentenced to "time served", meaning the punishment for the crime was exacted before the verdict was even determined -- and this is considered legal and constitutional.