I agree. I installed Linux (Mandrake 8.0) for the first time last weekend. I have never used Linux before in my life. I don't know any of the commands or syntaxes, but I am learning because I refuse to put up with XP.
I would suggest, instead, getting a Mac with OS X on it. Unlike Linux, it actually has a useful user interface and productivity applications. And Apple hardware is rock solid.
I personally have been working on slowly removing all Microsoft from my house (9 computers). I won't stick Linux on a one of them. Mac OS X for the desktops, FreeBSD for the servers, and OpenBSD for the firewalls.
There's a problem here, which can be summed up quite simply:
Internal combustion engines use gasoline, not money, to burn!
It sounds like I need to give you a lesson in economics. The cost of the gasoline is the monetary value placed by the gas station on the gasoline. In short, the gas station values the money I give it more than it values the gasoline. I pay more for my SUV habit because I burn more.
If I paid for all of the world's remaining deposits of coal, oil, petroleum, etc. at a fair price I'd certainly have paid for the resources I'm using, but that wouldn't really matter, as every current automobile on the roads would be rendered completely useless.
If you paid for all the remaining deposits of natural resources, that implies that someone was willing to give them all up. It is very hard to compare the economics with purchasing an inconsequential percentage of a resource to exhausting it. The price curve marches towards infinity. As you purchase a greater % of the total supply, subsequent quantities become more and more expensive because they come to have greater and greater value to those who are selling it.
And that's leaving aside issues of pollution and safety. Throwing money at an issue doesn't make it any less of an issue, and to think that it does is the ultimate folly of a modern capitalist economy.
Money is not a capitalist concept. If we had no money and no capitalism, we will still have a concept of value. Money is simply a metric of that value. If society values a gallon of gasoline more than I do, it can pay more money for that gallon of gasoline.
Oh, and with respect to pollution and safety... That's why gasoline is so heavily taxed. I favor higher taxes on it. I think Americans are babies about energy prices. A gallong of gas should cost $3/gallon or about that much. If it did, I would certainly reconsider driving an SUV.
And on the renewable resource issue, IMHO, the sooner we run oout the better. Because the sooner we run out, the sooner we will find a better source of energy. With gas prices as outrageously cheap as they are today and oil reserves being so plentiful, there is no incentive to find alternative sources of energy.
Re:Of course you can justify terrorism
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 2
The Israelists are just reclaiming their land that they held for over a thousand years before the Romans moved them out. Just because they are one of the oldest surviving cultures in the world doesn't make their land claim any less signifigant
This has to be a troll, because no one can be so daft as to claim the validity of land claims dating back thousands of years. By that measure, I am sure everyone has some sort of claim on just about every piece of land in the world.
God help us if the Italians figure out this loophole.
Re:Of course you can justify terrorism
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 3
How bout the french resistance fighters in France during their occupation by Germany in WWII?
Those acts were acts of war against non-civilian, combatant targets in the context of a declared war. That is not terrorism, it is called guerrila warfare.
I bought one of these vehicles. I pay for my choice to do so by having to buy more gasoline. Simple economics. I believe the benefits of driving an SUV are worth the increased costs of driving one. The extra money I spend on gasoline pays for a) the extra resources I am using b) extra taxes I pay to help counter the environmental effects of SUV's.
Re:Of course you can justify terrorism
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 1
Its not very PC to say it but Israel was built and run by terrorists....going all the way back to the 40 and 50's.
The same people who were directly responsible for murder then ran the country.
Why exactly were they justified???? Seems to me, they started a nation on someone else's land and kicked them out. That's justified?
That issue aside, terrorism is NEVER justified, no matter what the cause. It is terrorism specifically because it aims to force people to take action by creating fear in them--fear of loss of property or life.
These so-called eco-terrorists do not even have a valid issue. Slash the tires on my SUV because you do not like what kind of car I drive? Fuck you. Should I destroy your property because I don't like your politics?
Microsoft Windows has better security than Linux out of the box
Though Windows security is an oxymoron, Linux users should not be strutting around proudly. Every Linux distro I know of is a CD full of security holes "out of the box".
You are not talking about derivative works. You are talking about distinct works that interact with another work. For example, my Java application is not a derivative work of the Java platform. This is the scenario you address. And, as you state, whatever license I may impose on that product has no bearing on the license under which you use the JVM.
On the other hand, if you take my mSQL JDBC driver and modify it to support MySQL, that is a derivative work. People using that derivative work are bound both by any licensing I have in place and any licensing you put in place.
Not true. The original copyright applies as well as the new copyright. In order for the downstream person to use the derivative work, they must have the rights both to the derivative and original.
I think I would expect more insightful commentaries from someone that has written books published by Oreilly than "No way in hell you can do that with Perl where you have to be an expert in order to read other people's code.".
That's kinda too generalized and/or clueless, isn't it?
It is a generalization, but not, it is not clueless. The generalization is, of course, that you have to be a Perl expert in order to be able to read the Perl code of others. It is a generalization, however, that does very much reflect the state of the Perl language--even if it does not hold for every single piece of Perl source code. No one in their right mind would include Perl code in large scale software systems. That's an absolute, not a generalization. Perl has quite simply been applied to problem domains way outside of its core strengths and has, quite honestly, outlived its usefulness.
On Whitespace
I have to underline Guido's side remark about the person who asked about whitespace not having used Python before. When I first encountered Python, I thought the idea of syntactically meaningful whitespace was absurd. Then I realized that I, as a novice with very little understanding of Python, could read some of the most complex code from expert Python coders. No way in hell you can do that with Perl where you have to be an expert in order to read other people's code. This syntactic whitespace remains useful even when you become an expert, especially and expert who has to deal with novices daily.
Unless your code is for you and only you, readability is perhaps the single most important feature of your code.
On Python for Teaching
Guido stated:
But my *favorite* use of Python is at a teaching language, to teach the principles of programming, without fuss. Think about it -- it's the next generation!
In a similar vein, I also use Python as a whiteboard language even though I do most of my programming in Java. Specifically, Python let's you write out valid programming logic that reads like English. The result is that by thinking on the whiteboard in Python and then translating into Java, I end up with sounder programming logic.
The author of this article fails to get it just as much as the people promoting banner ads don't get it, but for different reasons.
Banner ad promoters don't get it because they don't understand Web users. They fail to understand that the Web medium makes it possible to ignore ads in ways not possible in traditional media. And people will work hard to ignore ads. Finally, if people ignore the ads, ad buyers won't buy the ads.
The author, however, doesn't get it because he does not understand ad buyers. Ad buyers really don't want to learn about the different demographics of different Web site users. While his approach might work for the New York Times, it almost certainly would not work for anything with a lesser name. Simply put, it is too much work for ad buyers to worry about all those details.
The US are indeed a melting pot of people, but it is NOT a melting pot of ideas.
You are talking out of your ass. The US is the source of most innovation that occurs in the world--cultural, political, technical, etc. Most of our innovations come from using ideas from different viewpoints and crafting a solution.
And another word for melting pot is conformity. When you melt things together, the differences begin to fade away as something altogether new emerges.
If you are talking about "forced conformity", that's simply a load of crap.
You're saying that China doesn't have any airplanes to bother us with? Sure they do, but if they did we'd have them destroyed before they got within sight of our coast. and if they were spy planes, they probably wouldn't be allowed to leave China
It takes a little more than simply having an airplane to be able to engage the sort of activities the US engages in against China. China simply does not have the technology to do these things.
Russia does, and Russia engages in those activites against us. Funny, counter to your silly assumptions, we are not constantly blowing Russian planes out ofthe sky!
Many in the world will be wary of this new power, but it is well known that China is a much more outward looking nation that america historically speaking, and far less insular.
Nothing could be futher from the truth. China is a xenophobic, imperialist, racist nation. Only the most xenophobic people on earth could have come up with the Great Wall of China. China has always shunned the outside world, even when the ideas from the outside world would better their society. That is why the nation that 1000 years ago was the greatest nation on earth no longer is the greatest nation on earth. They cannot learn from the outside world.
The USA, on the other hand, is a melting pot of people's and ideas from all over the globe. That is why America is the greatest nation on earth today. And while it will remain such for a while still.
America did not send a spy plane over China. It sent one into international airspace outside China. China would do the same if it had the technical capabilities to do so.
I am becoming increasingly frustrated as a citizen trying to explain technology issues to my Minnesota representatives. I never hear any responses from them, and I certainly have no indication that I will ever be heard unless I become a lobbiest. My question is, how can people who understand technology issues get in touch with, educate, and explain points of view to their elected officials?
I know on an online mud I run, Nightmare, we have had online votes since 1994. Not Web based, but the patent does not seem to make any claims abut the UI.
MySQL is a great DB for fast read access where things like row locking aren't very important. Great for the web when you don't want to spend a lot of money. But if you've already got SQL then using MySQL is just plain dumb. SQL on NT will out-perform MySQL in just about every way. Not using it just because you don't like Microsoft could get you fired, and IMO it would be justified.
And that's a rather idiotic blanket response. In fact, for many Web applications, MySQL will outperform any major commercial database engine. This is because MySQL simply cannot be beat for heavy-read database performance. So the question for the backend is really: What kind of transactions do you need to support and what is your budget? If you already have the licenses or if you have some decent transactional needs, then Microsoft SQL is a good answer.
As far as the client end goes, why the hell is a database needed on the client? Access is NEVER an answer for anything, except maybe as a toy for learning about databases. As I heard someone say about C++ once, if Access is the answer, then it must be a very strange question.
I take your point about people not challenging complaints, but surely you don't think that a www.guinnesssucks.com is cybersquatting if it complains about guinness?
No, it is not. That's why Lockheed lost its complaint. But the guinesssucks site was not a site for complaining about guiness. It was purchased by someone for the sole purpose of selling it to guiness at a higher rate. That is cybersquatting.
Re:Yet another knee-jerk, anti-WIPO /. Posting
on
Is It OK To Sucks?
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· Score: 2
People should have a forum for disputing issues. If the disputes are not refuted, then the dispute is won.
Honestly, I have not seen few situations in which a domain name holder should have one. The reason the WIPO rules this way is because the domain name holder is almost ALWAYS a cybersquatter--someone just holding the domain name so they can sell it at an absurd rate. The problem is that/. proclaims headlines like GUINESS TAKES AWAY GUINESSSUCKS.COM, ETC FROM INDIVIDUAL and no one here bothers to read the fine print that the domain holder did not even bother to challenge the complain.
Yet another knee-jerk, anti-WIPO /. Posting
on
Is It OK To Sucks?
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· Score: 4
Whine, bitch and moan left and right about the WIPO without even considering the arguments... So fucking typical.
READ THE FUCKING DECISIONS!!!!!!!!
In the Guiness case, the Responded was someone blatently trying to make money off of selling the domains to Guiness! HE DID NOT EVEN BOTHER TO FILE A RESPONSE!!!!!!!!!!
In the Lockheed-Martin case, there was a very well-reasoned response and the decision on the part of the WIPO itself was very well written and very well reasoned.
Writing your own OS in 100% assembler for your current architecture will be the fastest... This is also much harder than running FreeBSD or Linux. Does this make it the better choice?
No, it does not.
Clearly you are having a very hard time understanding my point. My point was that the Linux community is largely made up of hippocrites, not that one should always choose the technically superior technology.
Linux community has traditionally scoffed at issues like ease of install and the usability of the user interface. They made fun of Windows users that valued user experience over technical superiority. In the face of FreeBSD, they highlight usability issues because of Linux's technical inferiority. You can't have it both ways.
Personally, I don't see a real use for Linux. That would be because it does not match the things I value in an operating system. I am in the middle of replacing my only Linux component--my firewall--with OpenBSD. My clients are Windows 2000, and my servers are Solaris. Different OSes for different needs, all of which are better than Linux for each of those needs.
Oh, and with respect to the other joker who said...
yet another "all slashdotters must thing alike" comment (disguised as an "all linux users must think alike" comment).
Generalization is critical to human thinking and discorse. You have a valid point only if one or more of the following is true:
I used "all", "each", or "every" to qualify the noun "Linux users". (I did not)
You followed up with evidence that things I said are not, in fact, true of the generalized Linux community. (You did not)
I never said "all" of anything. I used the term "Linux users" as a generalization of the concept I use in this post of "Linux community". This is a perfectly valid generalization as long as the things I say are true with respect to much of the Linux community, regardless of its truth with respect to any particular member of the Linux community.
I hope you now better understand the role of generalization in human discourse.
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest, instead, getting a Mac with OS X on it. Unlike Linux, it actually has a useful user interface and productivity applications. And Apple hardware is rock solid.
I personally have been working on slowly removing all Microsoft from my house (9 computers). I won't stick Linux on a one of them. Mac OS X for the desktops, FreeBSD for the servers, and OpenBSD for the firewalls.
Internal combustion engines use gasoline, not money, to burn!
It sounds like I need to give you a lesson in economics. The cost of the gasoline is the monetary value placed by the gas station on the gasoline. In short, the gas station values the money I give it more than it values the gasoline. I pay more for my SUV habit because I burn more.
If I paid for all of the world's remaining deposits of coal, oil, petroleum, etc. at a fair price I'd certainly have paid for the resources I'm using, but that wouldn't really matter, as every current automobile on the roads would be rendered completely useless.
If you paid for all the remaining deposits of natural resources, that implies that someone was willing to give them all up. It is very hard to compare the economics with purchasing an inconsequential percentage of a resource to exhausting it. The price curve marches towards infinity. As you purchase a greater % of the total supply, subsequent quantities become more and more expensive because they come to have greater and greater value to those who are selling it.
And that's leaving aside issues of pollution and safety. Throwing money at an issue doesn't make it any less of an issue, and to think that it does is the ultimate folly of a modern capitalist economy.
Money is not a capitalist concept. If we had no money and no capitalism, we will still have a concept of value. Money is simply a metric of that value. If society values a gallon of gasoline more than I do, it can pay more money for that gallon of gasoline.
Oh, and with respect to pollution and safety... That's why gasoline is so heavily taxed. I favor higher taxes on it. I think Americans are babies about energy prices. A gallong of gas should cost $3/gallon or about that much. If it did, I would certainly reconsider driving an SUV.
And on the renewable resource issue, IMHO, the sooner we run oout the better. Because the sooner we run out, the sooner we will find a better source of energy. With gas prices as outrageously cheap as they are today and oil reserves being so plentiful, there is no incentive to find alternative sources of energy.
This has to be a troll, because no one can be so daft as to claim the validity of land claims dating back thousands of years. By that measure, I am sure everyone has some sort of claim on just about every piece of land in the world.
God help us if the Italians figure out this loophole.
Those acts were acts of war against non-civilian, combatant targets in the context of a declared war. That is not terrorism, it is called guerrila warfare.
I bought one of these vehicles. I pay for my choice to do so by having to buy more gasoline. Simple economics. I believe the benefits of driving an SUV are worth the increased costs of driving one. The extra money I spend on gasoline pays for a) the extra resources I am using b) extra taxes I pay to help counter the environmental effects of SUV's.
The same people who were directly responsible for murder then ran the country.
Why exactly were they justified???? Seems to me, they started a nation on someone else's land and kicked them out. That's justified?
That issue aside, terrorism is NEVER justified, no matter what the cause. It is terrorism specifically because it aims to force people to take action by creating fear in them--fear of loss of property or life.
These so-called eco-terrorists do not even have a valid issue. Slash the tires on my SUV because you do not like what kind of car I drive? Fuck you. Should I destroy your property because I don't like your politics?
Though Windows security is an oxymoron, Linux users should not be strutting around proudly. Every Linux distro I know of is a CD full of security holes "out of the box".
Yes it does, that is exactly what copyright is about.
You are not talking about derivative works. You are talking about distinct works that interact with another work. For example, my Java application is not a derivative work of the Java platform. This is the scenario you address. And, as you state, whatever license I may impose on that product has no bearing on the license under which you use the JVM.
On the other hand, if you take my mSQL JDBC driver and modify it to support MySQL, that is a derivative work. People using that derivative work are bound both by any licensing I have in place and any licensing you put in place.
Not true. The original copyright applies as well as the new copyright. In order for the downstream person to use the derivative work, they must have the rights both to the derivative and original.
The point of this whole endeavor is exactly what?
That's kinda too generalized and/or clueless, isn't it?
It is a generalization, but not, it is not clueless. The generalization is, of course, that you have to be a Perl expert in order to be able to read the Perl code of others. It is a generalization, however, that does very much reflect the state of the Perl language--even if it does not hold for every single piece of Perl source code. No one in their right mind would include Perl code in large scale software systems. That's an absolute, not a generalization. Perl has quite simply been applied to problem domains way outside of its core strengths and has, quite honestly, outlived its usefulness.
I have to underline Guido's side remark about the person who asked about whitespace not having used Python before. When I first encountered Python, I thought the idea of syntactically meaningful whitespace was absurd. Then I realized that I, as a novice with very little understanding of Python, could read some of the most complex code from expert Python coders. No way in hell you can do that with Perl where you have to be an expert in order to read other people's code. This syntactic whitespace remains useful even when you become an expert, especially and expert who has to deal with novices daily.
Unless your code is for you and only you, readability is perhaps the single most important feature of your code.
On Python for Teaching
Guido stated:
But my *favorite* use of Python is at a teaching language, to teach the principles of programming, without fuss. Think about it -- it's the next generation!
In a similar vein, I also use Python as a whiteboard language even though I do most of my programming in Java. Specifically, Python let's you write out valid programming logic that reads like English. The result is that by thinking on the whiteboard in Python and then translating into Java, I end up with sounder programming logic.
Banner ad promoters don't get it because they don't understand Web users. They fail to understand that the Web medium makes it possible to ignore ads in ways not possible in traditional media. And people will work hard to ignore ads. Finally, if people ignore the ads, ad buyers won't buy the ads.
The author, however, doesn't get it because he does not understand ad buyers. Ad buyers really don't want to learn about the different demographics of different Web site users. While his approach might work for the New York Times, it almost certainly would not work for anything with a lesser name. Simply put, it is too much work for ad buyers to worry about all those details.
You are talking out of your ass. The US is the source of most innovation that occurs in the world--cultural, political, technical, etc. Most of our innovations come from using ideas from different viewpoints and crafting a solution.
And another word for melting pot is conformity. When you melt things together, the differences begin to fade away as something altogether new emerges.
If you are talking about "forced conformity", that's simply a load of crap.
It takes a little more than simply having an airplane to be able to engage the sort of activities the US engages in against China. China simply does not have the technology to do these things.
Russia does, and Russia engages in those activites against us. Funny, counter to your silly assumptions, we are not constantly blowing Russian planes out ofthe sky!
Nothing could be futher from the truth. China is a xenophobic, imperialist, racist nation. Only the most xenophobic people on earth could have come up with the Great Wall of China. China has always shunned the outside world, even when the ideas from the outside world would better their society. That is why the nation that 1000 years ago was the greatest nation on earth no longer is the greatest nation on earth. They cannot learn from the outside world.
The USA, on the other hand, is a melting pot of people's and ideas from all over the globe. That is why America is the greatest nation on earth today. And while it will remain such for a while still.
America did not send a spy plane over China. It sent one into international airspace outside China. China would do the same if it had the technical capabilities to do so.
I am becoming increasingly frustrated as a citizen trying to explain technology issues to my Minnesota representatives. I never hear any responses from them, and I certainly have no indication that I will ever be heard unless I become a lobbiest. My question is, how can people who understand technology issues get in touch with, educate, and explain points of view to their elected officials?
I know on an online mud I run, Nightmare, we have had online votes since 1994. Not Web based, but the patent does not seem to make any claims abut the UI.
And that's a rather idiotic blanket response. In fact, for many Web applications, MySQL will outperform any major commercial database engine. This is because MySQL simply cannot be beat for heavy-read database performance. So the question for the backend is really: What kind of transactions do you need to support and what is your budget? If you already have the licenses or if you have some decent transactional needs, then Microsoft SQL is a good answer.
As far as the client end goes, why the hell is a database needed on the client? Access is NEVER an answer for anything, except maybe as a toy for learning about databases. As I heard someone say about C++ once, if Access is the answer, then it must be a very strange question.
No, it is not. That's why Lockheed lost its complaint. But the guinesssucks site was not a site for complaining about guiness. It was purchased by someone for the sole purpose of selling it to guiness at a higher rate. That is cybersquatting.
People should have a forum for disputing issues. If the disputes are not refuted, then the dispute is won.
Honestly, I have not seen few situations in which a domain name holder should have one. The reason the WIPO rules this way is because the domain name holder is almost ALWAYS a cybersquatter--someone just holding the domain name so they can sell it at an absurd rate. The problem is that /. proclaims headlines like GUINESS TAKES AWAY GUINESSSUCKS.COM, ETC FROM INDIVIDUAL and no one here bothers to read the fine print that the domain holder did not even bother to challenge the complain.
READ THE FUCKING DECISIONS!!!!!!!!
In the Guiness case, the Responded was someone blatently trying to make money off of selling the domains to Guiness! HE DID NOT EVEN BOTHER TO FILE A RESPONSE!!!!!!!!!!
In the Lockheed-Martin case, there was a very well-reasoned response and the decision on the part of the WIPO itself was very well written and very well reasoned.
Different situations, different results.
No, it does not.
Clearly you are having a very hard time understanding my point. My point was that the Linux community is largely made up of hippocrites, not that one should always choose the technically superior technology.
Linux community has traditionally scoffed at issues like ease of install and the usability of the user interface. They made fun of Windows users that valued user experience over technical superiority. In the face of FreeBSD, they highlight usability issues because of Linux's technical inferiority. You can't have it both ways.
Personally, I don't see a real use for Linux. That would be because it does not match the things I value in an operating system. I am in the middle of replacing my only Linux component--my firewall--with OpenBSD. My clients are Windows 2000, and my servers are Solaris. Different OSes for different needs, all of which are better than Linux for each of those needs.
Oh, and with respect to the other joker who said...
yet another "all slashdotters must thing alike" comment (disguised as an "all linux users must think alike" comment).
Generalization is critical to human thinking and discorse. You have a valid point only if one or more of the following is true:
I never said "all" of anything. I used the term "Linux users" as a generalization of the concept I use in this post of "Linux community". This is a perfectly valid generalization as long as the things I say are true with respect to much of the Linux community, regardless of its truth with respect to any particular member of the Linux community.
I hope you now better understand the role of generalization in human discourse.