Agreed. On the other hand, any organization of sufficient size shouldn't be buggering around with OEM licenses. Smaller organizations are unlikely to have the IT resources to handle switching to Linux.
A) Those licenses for commercial software are paid for, and if a company doesn't have the money to purchase new software licenses they probably don't have the money for new hardware.
B) Most of the licenses that I've dealt with allow the license to be transfered from one machine to another, at least within an organization and particularly for the types of software that FLOSS can replace. So if a new machine is purchased and an old one is retired, the license is still paid for.
C) If there is an economic crunch, chances are that the businesses are retaining current staffing levels (if they aren't actually going down). So the number of licenses required will stay the same, if not decline. Again, everything is paid for.
D) Retraining and rolling out an entirely different system will cost money. I highly doubt that they would save any money on managing their systems either, since Microsoft provides fairly extensive management tools (many of which I haven't seen the likes of under Linux).
I don't know the particulars of this law, but in my jurisdiction teachers can lose their jobs if they're friends with former students. Even if it was a student of several years past and they are well over the age of 18. (They justify this because teachers are in a 'position of trust' and it is easy for them to abuse that trust.)
Ever teach in a small town? You basically know everyone from the tiniest tot to the most elderly elder. In that case, it's quite easy to be a family friend and maybe you would and maybe you wouldn't "friend" their child (a potential student) on a social networking site. That would be illegal because it's an exclusive non-work related website. Give me a break.
There are professional boundaries in teaching, and they have to be fairly well maintained because you are working with other people's children. But sometimes things go too far. Just as you shouldn't let your social life interfere with teaching, teaching shouldn't interfere with your social life.
Verify that a patent was filed, then check with a lawyer. The lawyer should be able to tell you:
a) if the patent has actually expired
b) how to reproduce the library as closely as possible to the patent's description without being sued over copyright (over the original library)
If it has expired and you can reproduce the library without violating copyrights, that patent should be a good defence if someone claims that you violated their patents (on that portion of your code).
The thing is, our economic growth is based upon credit. (Perhaps too easy credit, but we still need it.) Handing out credit requires some way of knowing who you're giving it to, otherwise the system is easy to cheat. Now SSNs may not have been the perfect solution since it was designed for something else, but it was readily and almost universally available.
Life lesson: those who fear that they will lose their freedom if they lose their privacy are usually so busy defending their privacy that they do not have freedom.
Here's the thing. There's maintaining your privacy, then there's shutting yourself out of the world because you're trying to protect a part of your privacy that aren't very defendable. To some people, having a Facebook profile is like walking on a public street. People on the street know what their name is and know what they look like. Protecting the privacy of their name and likeness would be cutting them off socially. In a very real sense, that sort of privacy would be a loss of their freedom.
You may draw the line somewhere else. I know that I do. But, for some people, just wouldn't be free if they had to worry about a stranger knowing their name and face or even some of their habits.
As for the SSN thing, the government is to blame for not assigning numbers properly. The numbers themselves aren't necessarily a problem.
Even some Slashdot users would assume 6-sided. Believe it or not, just because we share a subset of interests doesn't mean that we share the same set of interests.
If everyone jumped onto the free operating system bandwagon overnight, you would have the very same problem. Only it would come in the form of "Hello Kitty Ubuntu: a cute computer for cute girls" or "Machobuntu: the rugged OS for the tough guy." (Sorry about the stereotypes, but grandma said she'd root my box if I poked fun at the elderly yet again.)
Then there are other attack vectors. The basic problem is that most people don't have the ability to verify the authenticity of the stuff that they install.
I thought one of the major driving forces to outsourcing was that human labour was cheaper than mechanization. Provided, of course, that the human labour accepted minimal standards for employment (pay, safety, etc.). And that's exactly what developing nations provided.
And now manufacturers in these nations are talking about increased mechanization in order to circumvent the desire of workers for better conditions of employment. In a lot of respects, it sounds like we (in the western world) just shot ourselves in the head: we shipped out the low skill jobs and we don't have the infrastructure for the high skill jobs needed in highly mechanized factories.
I think that a lot of people are missing the point of my earlier comment:
This is the way the world works, and it will continue to work like that no matter how upset you get about it. Accepting the word of a government research scientist is foolish because there is a conflict of interest. The government wants to promote an agenda and some governments will do anything to make sure that everyone toes the line. This is really no different than accepting the word of a tobacco or pharmaceutical company research scientist because their employers have a product to sell. You have a clear conflict of interest, taking what they say as the whole truth would be dangerous.
Now you can go through life screaming that scientists shouldn't be muzzled, but the fact of the matter is that you're going to lead a very bitter and angry life. It has happened, there is no way to stop it from happening, so it is going to happen again. So face up to the facts and start looking at researchers that are not in a place where interests conflict, which would include most university research scientists.
True. On the otherhand, I don't recall the actual muzzling of scientist by centrist (right or left wing) governments. Yet North Americans have enjoyed at least two such leaders over the past decade.
Thus the comparison to the tobacco companies. That being said, I think that a man like Harper believe that the governent departments are there to inform policy decisions rather than the public. Whether he listens to what they say is an open question, but they must not question his authority... erm, leadership. That's likely also why he screwed around with the census.
Or maybe not. Harper is dangerously ideological, but he is not stupid. He is skilled at manipulating public opinion and likes to prey upon the vulnerable once he has swayed public opinion (which usually reenforces people's support for him). But it is unlikely that he would ever initiate a campaign of terror that would end up with 2/3rds of Canada's population being in jail. Or even 5% of our population for that matter.
I was under the distinct impression that the US civilian space program was entirely reliant upon the space shuttle, and perfectly aware that the US military had launch capabilities (thus the 'and their military'). Of course I could be wrong about the US civilian space program because I've been cynical about anything coming out of NASA for two decades.
As for NASA's ability to depend upon up and coming private contractors, I'll believe it when it happens. My apologies for the cynicism, but NASA is encased in politics and anyone wanting to launch rockets into orbit has to deal with international regulations. The former means that they don't always mean what they say, the latter means that they can't always live up to it if they mean it. (The latter is also why they depend upon large military contractors.)
That being said, I will be happily impressed if companies like SpaceX are viable in the long term.
This is a department of the federal government. It is emphatically not an independent university research scientist nor even an independent (from the governent) research scientist. Since they are an employee of the government they are expected to comply with their employers demands. In this case, it mean that you won't get to say much unless you are echoing government policy. In that respect, it's not much different from a tobacco company telling their scientists not to talk about the health effects of smoking.
The Soviets definitely had the launch capabilities for high northern latitudes (they launched satellites at 62.8 degress North). Whether Soyuz could do that with its typical payload, I don't know.
I know that it is far too early to tell what's going to happen with the U.S. space program, but I find it quite ironic that Russia managed to rebuild their manned and civilian space program within years of the political and economic collapse of the U.S.S.R. and that the U.S.A. is depending upon them even though the American economic collapse is minor in comparison.
Now I've been out of the space exploration loop for a few years, but it strikes me that the U.S.A. does not have civilian or manned launch capabilities at the moment. That leaves the civilian program contracting out launches to the Russians, E.S.A., and their military. And quite frankly I don't see that changing in the near future since I don't think that they have the political will to change it.
Maybe Windows and Linux users are buying it for different reasons? Linux users may be trying to support game development on their platform. At least one Windows user (myself) is just trying out a bunch of indie games, and since I find indie games are hit and miss I don't want to dump too much money into it.
(Also, as several people have noted, they already owned several of the games. Since the video suggests that some of these games are new to Linux, Linux users may be willing to pay more because they are getting more.)
The YouTube of... electronics. So it'll be 50 year olds telling you that your microprocessor based solution reduces to a 555 as well as a handful of capacitors and resistors.
I use Twitter because of SMS, and it doesn't cost me a dime (since my plan has unlimited SMS whether I use it or not). So until Google offers SMS services, Twitter style, anyone going from Twitter to Google+ will be limiting their market. Then again, maybe I'm special.
Agreed. It depends upon your interests, your library's resources, and your patience.
But the summary mentioned GNU/Linux so I figured that freedom may have been an element. Most of the librarians I've encountered are supportive of the freedom to read (e.g. resources should be free, censorship is evil) and some libraries are very proactive in making whatever resources they do have widely available regardless of where you live (e.g. some of the earliest big online resources were assembled by librarians, many digitization projects are at least partially run by major libraries, they are fighting to keep the publishers in line in this digital age).
If you are a freedom lover like those librarians, then you have to be willing to make some compromises -- and hopefully be willing to contribute as much as they do too.
I'm mentioning this because a lot of people forget that many public libraries have excellent video collections. It won't always be the latest and sometimes you'll have to wait for a popular movie, but most libraries also seem to share the same philosophy that GNU/Linux users share: the are advocates of freedom.
When people have a hard time getting menial jobs unless they have a high school diploma, jobs that require grade 6 literacy and math skills at best, is it really any surprise that masters are becoming the new bachelors?
Part of the reason is that employers need some way to differentiate potential hires. Better degrees represent more responsible individuals who have an ability to acquire and retain knowledge. As an added bonus, if the degree is in the right field, they also offer more skills and may have more relevant training.
Would a grocery store prefer a high school graduate over a drop-out? Of course. Why would they want to hire someone who probably didn't attend class punctually and worked hard enough to pass it?
Would a bank want an MBA over a BA? Of course. Why would they want to hire someone who isn't willing to continue their training to adapt to a changing workplace?
Granted, there are more cynical reasons too. But I'll leave others to bring those up...
Many of those people who "can't program" actually can program. They simply understand the program's requirements. Maintainable code is not always a requirement since a lot of software written in research labs is intended to be written once and run a handful of times.
It's also worth noting that properly structured code from a programmer's perspective is not always the same as properly structured code from a scientist's perspective. "Turn(ing) problems into object models," may be the last thing that scientific code needs because most problems are procedural in nature (particularly for data analysis, and even for modelling).
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. On the other hand, any organization of sufficient size shouldn't be buggering around with OEM licenses. Smaller organizations are unlikely to have the IT resources to handle switching to Linux.
A) Those licenses for commercial software are paid for, and if a company doesn't have the money to purchase new software licenses they probably don't have the money for new hardware.
B) Most of the licenses that I've dealt with allow the license to be transfered from one machine to another, at least within an organization and particularly for the types of software that FLOSS can replace. So if a new machine is purchased and an old one is retired, the license is still paid for.
C) If there is an economic crunch, chances are that the businesses are retaining current staffing levels (if they aren't actually going down). So the number of licenses required will stay the same, if not decline. Again, everything is paid for.
D) Retraining and rolling out an entirely different system will cost money. I highly doubt that they would save any money on managing their systems either, since Microsoft provides fairly extensive management tools (many of which I haven't seen the likes of under Linux).
For consumers, (A) and (B) still apply.
I don't know the particulars of this law, but in my jurisdiction teachers can lose their jobs if they're friends with former students. Even if it was a student of several years past and they are well over the age of 18. (They justify this because teachers are in a 'position of trust' and it is easy for them to abuse that trust.)
Ever teach in a small town? You basically know everyone from the tiniest tot to the most elderly elder. In that case, it's quite easy to be a family friend and maybe you would and maybe you wouldn't "friend" their child (a potential student) on a social networking site. That would be illegal because it's an exclusive non-work related website. Give me a break.
There are professional boundaries in teaching, and they have to be fairly well maintained because you are working with other people's children. But sometimes things go too far. Just as you shouldn't let your social life interfere with teaching, teaching shouldn't interfere with your social life.
Verify that a patent was filed, then check with a lawyer. The lawyer should be able to tell you:
a) if the patent has actually expired
b) how to reproduce the library as closely as possible to the patent's description without being sued over copyright (over the original library)
If it has expired and you can reproduce the library without violating copyrights, that patent should be a good defence if someone claims that you violated their patents (on that portion of your code).
The thing is, our economic growth is based upon credit. (Perhaps too easy credit, but we still need it.) Handing out credit requires some way of knowing who you're giving it to, otherwise the system is easy to cheat. Now SSNs may not have been the perfect solution since it was designed for something else, but it was readily and almost universally available.
Life lesson: those who fear that they will lose their freedom if they lose their privacy are usually so busy defending their privacy that they do not have freedom.
Here's the thing. There's maintaining your privacy, then there's shutting yourself out of the world because you're trying to protect a part of your privacy that aren't very defendable. To some people, having a Facebook profile is like walking on a public street. People on the street know what their name is and know what they look like. Protecting the privacy of their name and likeness would be cutting them off socially. In a very real sense, that sort of privacy would be a loss of their freedom.
You may draw the line somewhere else. I know that I do. But, for some people, just wouldn't be free if they had to worry about a stranger knowing their name and face or even some of their habits.
As for the SSN thing, the government is to blame for not assigning numbers properly. The numbers themselves aren't necessarily a problem.
Even some Slashdot users would assume 6-sided. Believe it or not, just because we share a subset of interests doesn't mean that we share the same set of interests.
If everyone jumped onto the free operating system bandwagon overnight, you would have the very same problem. Only it would come in the form of "Hello Kitty Ubuntu: a cute computer for cute girls" or "Machobuntu: the rugged OS for the tough guy." (Sorry about the stereotypes, but grandma said she'd root my box if I poked fun at the elderly yet again.)
Then there are other attack vectors. The basic problem is that most people don't have the ability to verify the authenticity of the stuff that they install.
I thought one of the major driving forces to outsourcing was that human labour was cheaper than mechanization. Provided, of course, that the human labour accepted minimal standards for employment (pay, safety, etc.). And that's exactly what developing nations provided.
And now manufacturers in these nations are talking about increased mechanization in order to circumvent the desire of workers for better conditions of employment. In a lot of respects, it sounds like we (in the western world) just shot ourselves in the head: we shipped out the low skill jobs and we don't have the infrastructure for the high skill jobs needed in highly mechanized factories.
I think that a lot of people are missing the point of my earlier comment:
This is the way the world works, and it will continue to work like that no matter how upset you get about it. Accepting the word of a government research scientist is foolish because there is a conflict of interest. The government wants to promote an agenda and some governments will do anything to make sure that everyone toes the line. This is really no different than accepting the word of a tobacco or pharmaceutical company research scientist because their employers have a product to sell. You have a clear conflict of interest, taking what they say as the whole truth would be dangerous.
Now you can go through life screaming that scientists shouldn't be muzzled, but the fact of the matter is that you're going to lead a very bitter and angry life. It has happened, there is no way to stop it from happening, so it is going to happen again. So face up to the facts and start looking at researchers that are not in a place where interests conflict, which would include most university research scientists.
True. On the otherhand, I don't recall the actual muzzling of scientist by centrist (right or left wing) governments. Yet North Americans have enjoyed at least two such leaders over the past decade.
Thus the comparison to the tobacco companies. That being said, I think that a man like Harper believe that the governent departments are there to inform policy decisions rather than the public. Whether he listens to what they say is an open question, but they must not question his authority ... erm, leadership. That's likely also why he screwed around with the census.
And the other 1/3rd for ...
Or maybe not. Harper is dangerously ideological, but he is not stupid. He is skilled at manipulating public opinion and likes to prey upon the vulnerable once he has swayed public opinion (which usually reenforces people's support for him). But it is unlikely that he would ever initiate a campaign of terror that would end up with 2/3rds of Canada's population being in jail. Or even 5% of our population for that matter.
I was under the distinct impression that the US civilian space program was entirely reliant upon the space shuttle, and perfectly aware that the US military had launch capabilities (thus the 'and their military'). Of course I could be wrong about the US civilian space program because I've been cynical about anything coming out of NASA for two decades.
As for NASA's ability to depend upon up and coming private contractors, I'll believe it when it happens. My apologies for the cynicism, but NASA is encased in politics and anyone wanting to launch rockets into orbit has to deal with international regulations. The former means that they don't always mean what they say, the latter means that they can't always live up to it if they mean it. (The latter is also why they depend upon large military contractors.)
That being said, I will be happily impressed if companies like SpaceX are viable in the long term.
This is a department of the federal government. It is emphatically not an independent university research scientist nor even an independent (from the governent) research scientist. Since they are an employee of the government they are expected to comply with their employers demands. In this case, it mean that you won't get to say much unless you are echoing government policy. In that respect, it's not much different from a tobacco company telling their scientists not to talk about the health effects of smoking.
The Soviets definitely had the launch capabilities for high northern latitudes (they launched satellites at 62.8 degress North). Whether Soyuz could do that with its typical payload, I don't know.
I know that it is far too early to tell what's going to happen with the U.S. space program, but I find it quite ironic that Russia managed to rebuild their manned and civilian space program within years of the political and economic collapse of the U.S.S.R. and that the U.S.A. is depending upon them even though the American economic collapse is minor in comparison.
Now I've been out of the space exploration loop for a few years, but it strikes me that the U.S.A. does not have civilian or manned launch capabilities at the moment. That leaves the civilian program contracting out launches to the Russians, E.S.A., and their military. And quite frankly I don't see that changing in the near future since I don't think that they have the political will to change it.
Maybe Windows and Linux users are buying it for different reasons? Linux users may be trying to support game development on their platform. At least one Windows user (myself) is just trying out a bunch of indie games, and since I find indie games are hit and miss I don't want to dump too much money into it.
(Also, as several people have noted, they already owned several of the games. Since the video suggests that some of these games are new to Linux, Linux users may be willing to pay more because they are getting more.)
The YouTube of ... electronics. So it'll be 50 year olds telling you that your microprocessor based solution reduces to a 555 as well as a handful of capacitors and resistors.
I use Twitter because of SMS, and it doesn't cost me a dime (since my plan has unlimited SMS whether I use it or not). So until Google offers SMS services, Twitter style, anyone going from Twitter to Google+ will be limiting their market. Then again, maybe I'm special.
Agreed. It depends upon your interests, your library's resources, and your patience.
But the summary mentioned GNU/Linux so I figured that freedom may have been an element. Most of the librarians I've encountered are supportive of the freedom to read (e.g. resources should be free, censorship is evil) and some libraries are very proactive in making whatever resources they do have widely available regardless of where you live (e.g. some of the earliest big online resources were assembled by librarians, many digitization projects are at least partially run by major libraries, they are fighting to keep the publishers in line in this digital age).
If you are a freedom lover like those librarians, then you have to be willing to make some compromises -- and hopefully be willing to contribute as much as they do too.
I'm mentioning this because a lot of people forget that many public libraries have excellent video collections. It won't always be the latest and sometimes you'll have to wait for a popular movie, but most libraries also seem to share the same philosophy that GNU/Linux users share: the are advocates of freedom.
When people have a hard time getting menial jobs unless they have a high school diploma, jobs that require grade 6 literacy and math skills at best, is it really any surprise that masters are becoming the new bachelors?
Part of the reason is that employers need some way to differentiate potential hires. Better degrees represent more responsible individuals who have an ability to acquire and retain knowledge. As an added bonus, if the degree is in the right field, they also offer more skills and may have more relevant training.
Would a grocery store prefer a high school graduate over a drop-out? Of course. Why would they want to hire someone who probably didn't attend class punctually and worked hard enough to pass it?
Would a bank want an MBA over a BA? Of course. Why would they want to hire someone who isn't willing to continue their training to adapt to a changing workplace?
Granted, there are more cynical reasons too. But I'll leave others to bring those up ...
Many of those people who "can't program" actually can program. They simply understand the program's requirements. Maintainable code is not always a requirement since a lot of software written in research labs is intended to be written once and run a handful of times.
It's also worth noting that properly structured code from a programmer's perspective is not always the same as properly structured code from a scientist's perspective. "Turn(ing) problems into object models," may be the last thing that scientific code needs because most problems are procedural in nature (particularly for data analysis, and even for modelling).