I don't have to wade into the cesspool to determine that it is unpleasant and stinks.
For an overview of the period, I suggest "The Spanish Civil War" by Antony Beevor.
For a more in-depth discussion of anarchism in this context, I suggest "Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in Spain 1936-39" ed. by Sam Dolgoff.
And if Sun disappears then you can still buy stuff from Fujitsu.
As I mentioned above, there is more to a machine than the instruction set, and Sun has been forcing NDAs on people who want access to the information they need. TheoBSD refuse to sign, hence the current flap.
Yo, the first line was a quote from the parent. I rewrote it in the second line to question the author's assumption that proprietary software was necessary at all.
I recently built a very nice NetBSD workstation out of 1997-1999 era parts that my friends had lying around unused. It works great, running galeon, sawfish, gaim, xmms, xterm, screen, zsh, vim, mutt, postfix, and djbdns (yes, I know the license sucks).
Why spent $190 on fucking BBEdit when I can just run vi, emacs, nano, pico, ae, vim or any number of other kick ass apps? --> Why spend money on fucking MacOS and proprietary hardware when I can just run cheap used commodity hardware and free operating systems?
ok. why don't you do it? Who the hell is going to risk resources setting up a company that may or may not go bankrupt, and doesn't even have the incentive of making money at the end of the day.
Strangely, some people have what they call "values" that make them want to do things *without* getting rewarded with money or power. Of course, we are all "educated" to think that people are by nature unfeeling, endlessly consumptive robots, but that's not necessarily the case. Even if ESR tells you it is. He's wrong. The Spanish Revolution is a great existence proof.
That whole gift economy thing is just ESR trying to use free software to justify his warped political views (private property is The One True Holy Principle, other people don't really exist, etc.). Since when is the land of free software one of abundance? Just about every project is crying out for more developers. The unusual thing about free software is not the lack of "significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods," but the zero-marginal-reproduction-cost and the some-programmers-are-phenomenal factors. This enables cooperation among relatively few geographically dispersed people to produce lots of good software.
Look at his analogies:
1) Potlach -- consipicuous consumption as a display of wealth
2) Super-rich people's philanthropy -- they are realizing that when they die people will say they were bastards
Neither of these situations is remotely similar to a the globally-distributed non-hierarchical cooperative project that is the free software movement.
Microsoft may immediately terminate any account which it determines, in its sole discretion, is transmitting or is otherwise connected with any 'spam' or other unsolicited bulk email. In addition, because damages are often difficult to quantify, if actual damages cannot be reasonably calculated then you agree to pay Microsoft liquidated damages of five dollars (US$5.00) for each piece of 'spam' or unsolicited bulk email transmitted from or otherwise connected with your account. Otherwise you agree to pay Microsoft's actual damages, to the extent such actual damages can be reasonably calculated. You agree that Microsoft may charge such damages to your selected Payment Method, as set forth in the Microsoft Billing section, below.
That is pretty funny, given the atrocious security history of the hotmail site. If your account gets hijacked, *you* are to blame:
You are entirely responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password and account. Furthermore, you are entirely responsible for any and all activities that occur under your account. You agree to notify Microsoft immediately of any unauthorized use of your account or any other breach of security. Microsoft will not be liable for any loss that you may incur as a result of someone else using your password or account, either with or without your knowledge. However, you could be held liable for losses incurred by Microsoft or another party due to someone else using your account or password.
There are other places (such as freeshell.org) that will give you free webmail with less evil, and throw in shell access as well!
Unfortunately, we allow people to control our society who do not care about long-term problems. Even if you were to persuade most US citizens that they should be concerned, all of us would not be able to prevent a disaster without also changing society to be more democratically organized.
The big UN study a couple of years ago said that there had been only a couple inches of sea level rise, and that it was mostly due to expansion. I guess it's a matter of how big an effect must be to qualify as a "factor".
The "libertarianism" that "a lot of the Democrats and Republicans on slashdot would probably be able to agree on" is also the common subset of Right Libertarianism and anarchism.
For a discussion of the differences between anarchism and Right Libertarianism, and why Right Libertarianism would never work in practice (hint: absolute propertarian systems result in massive inequality and subsequent revolt), check out the relevant section of the anarchist faq.
Brief summary: a "free market" where one of the participants has property, and the other does not, is not free at all. If someone owns the road outside my house, and I need to go somewhere, I *must* pay him whatever he demands. In fact, in a pure "free market" system, those without property have to grovel at the feet of the propertied even for food. Of course, people won't put up with that nonsense indefinitely, as we can see from the historical examples of Europe (various 19th and 20th century revolutions), China (Maoism), and Russia (to name some famous ones). The net result is that supporting Right Libertarianism is really just supporting "widespread suffering followed by massive societal upheaval" -- probably not what you are after.
If you want the workers to accept private property and inequality, you have to actively prevent the system from imploding by redistributing wealth downward in ways that the "free market" mechanism does not. This is what social security and government services funded by progressive taxes are for.
Not that I'm a fan of such an arrangement -- I'm just pointing out that it is much more stable than the arrangement that Right Libertarians advocate.
As soon as FreeBSD and NetBSD implement good threading, there will be no need whatsoever to run Solaris.
When they'll be done is an open question, of course. The Net folks in particular tend to refuse to rush anything at all.
In the meantime, I can't see how solaris x86 is that much nicer than gentoo or debian (aside from having a working NFS implementation:). I personally detest having to maintain a solaris (sparc) box for my job.
Not many companies would put 'warfare' in a job descriptions firstly because few are in a mindset that they at war . . . . . People would think Coca-Cola completely daft if they asked for a CTO to help shut down Pepsi's website.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have to wade into the cesspool to determine that it is unpleasant and stinks.
For an overview of the period, I suggest "The Spanish Civil War" by Antony Beevor.
For a more in-depth discussion of anarchism in this context, I suggest "Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in Spain 1936-39" ed. by Sam Dolgoff.
And if Sun disappears then you can still buy stuff from Fujitsu.
As I mentioned above, there is more to a machine than the instruction set, and Sun has been forcing NDAs on people who want access to the information they need. TheoBSD refuse to sign, hence the current flap.
The details of their implementations of sparc *are* proprietary. That's what all the USIII NDA OpenBSD stuff is about . . . .
I don't see why anyone should mourn the passing of proprietary hardware, proprietary software (solaris), and pseudo-open standards (java).
Sun is not helping as it is. I will not be sad when the company disappears.
The Spanish Revolution was a crock
Care to explain your comment a bit? Your view of history apparently is somewhat different from mine, and I'd like to find out why you feel this way.
Yo, the first line was a quote from the parent. I rewrote it in the second line to question the author's assumption that proprietary software was necessary at all.
I recently built a very nice NetBSD workstation out of 1997-1999 era parts that my friends had lying around unused. It works great, running galeon, sawfish, gaim, xmms, xterm, screen, zsh, vim, mutt, postfix, and djbdns (yes, I know the license sucks).
Why spent $190 on fucking BBEdit when I can just run vi, emacs, nano, pico, ae, vim or any number of other kick ass apps?
-->
Why spend money on fucking MacOS and proprietary hardware when I can just run cheap used commodity hardware and free operating systems?
ok. why don't you do it? Who the hell is going to risk resources setting up a company that may or may not go bankrupt, and doesn't even have the incentive of making money at the end of the day.
Strangely, some people have what they call "values" that make them want to do things *without* getting rewarded with money or power. Of course, we are all "educated" to think that people are by nature unfeeling, endlessly consumptive robots, but that's not necessarily the case. Even if ESR tells you it is. He's wrong. The Spanish Revolution is a great existence proof.
If you're interested in this, check out his paper about anarchism and free software.
I'd like to hear more of his thoughts in this direction, though. Does he actually advocate workers' self-management in all things, or just in software?
Unix will likely go down with J2EE.
So then we will all use plan9? That might be cool, if Lucent's owners ever fix the license.
How about a real cashless society?
Neat! Thanks for the pointers. I guess there is intelligent life on Slashdot after all!
That's all well and good -- but why a separate package system? Why not make the packages /var/db/pkg packages?
Even more fun would be a pkgsrc-ized *NetBSD* system! Death to the monolithic base system! That is one thing, at least, that Red Hat got right.
That whole gift economy thing is just ESR trying to use free software to justify his warped political views (private property is The One True Holy Principle, other people don't really exist, etc.). Since when is the land of free software one of abundance? Just about every project is crying out for more developers. The unusual thing about free software is not the lack of "significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods," but the zero-marginal-reproduction-cost and the some-programmers-are-phenomenal factors. This enables cooperation among relatively few geographically dispersed people to produce lots of good software.
Look at his analogies:
1) Potlach -- consipicuous consumption as a display of wealth
2) Super-rich people's philanthropy -- they are realizing that when they die people will say they were bastards
Neither of these situations is remotely similar to a the globally-distributed non-hierarchical cooperative project that is the free software movement.
Moderated as a troll? But everything in there is factual! You need to review the definition of troll . . . .
Stanley Feinbaum (mister_feinbaum2002 AT hotmail DOT com)
and
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist. I have no tolerance for bad journalism!
You do, apparently, have a great tolerance for bad Terms of Use policies. Highlights include:
NO SPAM; DAMAGES
Microsoft may immediately terminate any account which it determines, in its sole discretion, is transmitting or is otherwise connected with any 'spam' or other unsolicited bulk email. In addition, because damages are often difficult to quantify, if actual damages cannot be reasonably calculated then you agree to pay Microsoft liquidated damages of five dollars (US$5.00) for each piece of 'spam' or unsolicited bulk email transmitted from or otherwise connected with your account. Otherwise you agree to pay Microsoft's actual damages, to the extent such actual damages can be reasonably calculated. You agree that Microsoft may charge such damages to your selected Payment Method, as set forth in the Microsoft Billing section, below.
That is pretty funny, given the atrocious security history of the hotmail site. If your account gets hijacked, *you* are to blame:
You are entirely responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password and account. Furthermore, you are entirely responsible for any and all activities that occur under your account. You agree to notify Microsoft immediately of any unauthorized use of your account or any other breach of security. Microsoft will not be liable for any loss that you may incur as a result of someone else using your password or account, either with or without your knowledge. However, you could be held liable for losses incurred by Microsoft or another party due to someone else using your account or password.
There are other places (such as freeshell.org) that will give you free webmail with less evil, and throw in shell access as well!
Unfortunately, we allow people to control our society who do not care about long-term problems. Even if you were to persuade most US citizens that they should be concerned, all of us would not be able to prevent a disaster without also changing society to be more democratically organized.
The big UN study a couple of years ago said that there had been only a couple inches of sea level rise, and that it was mostly due to expansion. I guess it's a matter of how big an effect must be to qualify as a "factor".
The "libertarianism" that "a lot of the Democrats and Republicans on slashdot would probably be able to agree on" is also the common subset of Right Libertarianism and anarchism.
For a discussion of the differences between anarchism and Right Libertarianism, and why Right Libertarianism would never work in practice (hint: absolute propertarian systems result in massive inequality and subsequent revolt), check out the relevant section of the anarchist faq.
Brief summary: a "free market" where one of the participants has property, and the other does not, is not free at all. If someone owns the road outside my house, and I need to go somewhere, I *must* pay him whatever he demands. In fact, in a pure "free market" system, those without property have to grovel at the feet of the propertied even for food. Of course, people won't put up with that nonsense indefinitely, as we can see from the historical examples of Europe (various 19th and 20th century revolutions), China (Maoism), and Russia (to name some famous ones). The net result is that supporting Right Libertarianism is really just supporting "widespread suffering followed by massive societal upheaval" -- probably not what you are after.
If you want the workers to accept private property and inequality, you have to actively prevent the system from imploding by redistributing wealth downward in ways that the "free market" mechanism does not. This is what social security and government services funded by progressive taxes are for.
Not that I'm a fan of such an arrangement -- I'm just pointing out that it is much more stable than the arrangement that Right Libertarians advocate.
I believe it passed unopposed. Leaving you three options:
1) spoil your vote
2) vote for someone other than the incumbent
3) don't even show up to vote
As soon as FreeBSD and NetBSD implement good threading, there will be no need whatsoever to run Solaris.
:). I personally detest having to maintain a solaris (sparc) box for my job.
When they'll be done is an open question, of course. The Net folks in particular tend to refuse to rush anything at all.
In the meantime, I can't see how solaris x86 is that much nicer than gentoo or debian (aside from having a working NFS implementation
VAXGeek, I trust you are using NetBSD/vax?
and as for Apple, well, they're trying to make a buck off you -- what do you expect? That's capitalism. There are other ways, you know.
Not many companies would put 'warfare' in a job descriptions firstly because few are in a mindset that they at war . . . . . People would think Coca-Cola completely daft if they asked for a CTO to help shut down Pepsi's website.
Ah, but Coca-Cola *is* at war, with its own workers. Behold the Google search for "coca cola columbia labor"!
Overrated? Huh? It wasn't even rated in the first place. Reply! Don't mysteriously mod!