Overrated ???? W.T.F. Everything I said is true. Does the truth hurt - or could you just not figure out what an 'equinal-sustainance-acceptance device' was ?
Now let me get the rest of you people straight. You refuse to considder a license open source until debian includes something that uses it ? Well great there goes the entire open-source dream... to hell and no handbasket to make it comfortable.
Just for the sake of the Debianophiles who came up with this new way to beg for a LART'ing I should point out some facts: One of the chief Debian Developers is also co-founder of the O.S.I - Ever hear of Rick Moen?
The O.S.I mission statement is the Debian Manifesto copied and pasted. Litterally, see www.tuxedo.org/~esr Click on Revenge Of The Hackers, Get it from the equinal-sustainance-acceptance device.
Ciao A.J.
Somebody had to do it.
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 1
May my karma forgive me:-)
Company Fucker Everybody knows to what tune to sing it
Shut your fucking face comp'ny fucker
your a cocksucking asslicking compny' fucker
you're a comp'ny fucker yes it's true
nobody fucks comp'nys quite like you
Shut your fucking face comp'ny fucker
your the one that fucked your comp'ny comp'ny fucker
You don't eat or sleep or mow the lawn you just fuck your comp'ny all day long
Comp'ny...Fucker....Comp'ny...Fucker
You're a comp'ny fucker I must say
You fucked your comp'ny yesterday
Why not free ? Simple so people like my countryman Mark Shuttleworth can become bilionaires and visit the ISS.
You know when he sold thawte, he gave every employee (including the gardenere) a Milion bucks. U.S.
I guess I am peeved at myself, the guy offered me a job two months before thawte boomed into South-Africa's largest IT success story. At the time nobody had a clue who thawte.com was. And I told him to stuff his job up his posterior.
Oh well, back to grinding out code in blazing Nigeria, thank all that is holy I am going home on Saturday.
I just want to finally shut up everybody who thinks you can't get paid to write open-source.
I started my programming career 4 years ago. Using Linux at home, working on and for windows doing closed source programming. I earned a small salary, went out and got drunk. Suffered a nervous breakdown.
Nowadays I work for another company. My bosses don't tell me what to do. I tell them what I did. I work on my own schedule. I get to travel all over the world. I get paid a huge salary (three and a half times what I used to earn). In fact after paying ALL my requisite expenses and my taxes I have 60% off my income left - which is about enough to buy six PS2's around here. As long as the product works my bosses are happy. The code I write is all GPL'd, all copyrighted to me (though I do more than just program) and I get paid to write it. See my linked homepage, check out direqcafe for an example of a program did under this contract.
The biggest surprize of all, I live in Pretoria, and work in Johannesburg South-Africa.
Reminds me of the time I went to one of our local stores (around here we call it Incredible Corruption) to get some blank CD's for burning some new distro release on.
Out of curiosity I ask the salesmen, "Do you sell any Linux box sets around here" "No we don't" "Oh allright." Then the moron hands me my my CD's in an incredible corruption printed shopping bag. Advertising their special on RedHat Linux boxed sets.
I tend to agree with you. South-Africa has a different perspective, everybody sees IT as easy many, so hundreds of people study it. Most drop out. The larger percentage of those who don't - are pathetic programmers. And there is a 50/50 gender distribution.
The best programmers will always be the hackers, I don't say that because I am one. Just like any field, the road to excellence runs through passion.
Hackers have that passion. They have a certain personality type. Those woman who do become programmers tend to be at the very top of their field here. I suspect this is because once the woman learn that they are not passionate about computers, they find something else to do. The men stick around for the cash. The woman who do stick around are hackers.
The hacker community has always been very gender neutral. And this gender neutrality should attract woman, if it doesn't it can only be because the hacker personality is for some reason or other less prevalent among woman. So be it. The world would be a lot better off if all the male-non-hackers were doing something else with them.
Sara, you are now on my friends list. I always liked woman who digged tech.
Cease and Desist Letter: From Some-Random-Lawfirm,
To whom it may concern: You the author of [insert novel title] are hereby required to cease and desist in all further attempts to distribute this work under U.S. Copyright law.
Your book forms part of a class of fiction known commonly as realistic, which is based on the real world. Our client, God, the creator of the World, the Heavens and The Orgasm and sole copyright holder to these works have ordered us to stop the rampant abuse of his copyright.
It was previously erroneosly thought that since these creations are bilions of years old, they have moved into the public domain. However the U.S. Congress has made clear it's believe that copyright laws are perpetual and furthermore that these new clauses are retroactively applicable.
Compare: The Sonny Bono Act of 1999.
Therefore all works of fiction and non-fiction (specifically those classified as 'science') in any media based upon or including images of these creations, have had their orriginal copyrights restored.
God has decided that, under certain conditions licenses may be obtained to publish derivative works provided they do not in any way contradict the accompanying users manual (Commonly called The Bible) and that full negotiable royalties are paid.
SMART????
What website do you think your reading ?
This is slashdot -where real hackers argue with wannabees over woblygooks while the RW goes on in blissfull ignorance.
I fail to see slashdot as being a place to look for smart people - even the inteligent visitors come here 'coz they want a break from thinking.
Well I certainly never expected to be acused of being a ludite. I am a techno-geek of the first water. Which is exactly why I am opposed to paladium. Not just the potential for misuse but the severe potential for destroying innovation. The impact this could have on hobbyist programmers is frightening.
Finally someone sees a little about what I am trying to say here.
To clear up some points: I never said that the UN would paladimize it's doc's I said that the UN could have some influence in stopping this from happening.
I said that having copyright systems on other people's machines limit WHO we can comunicate with will be a major problem.
I said that anything which forces us to upgrade will be a problem.
I said (based on RMS's book) that the inabillity to run ANY Software you want on new computers will be a major problem.
-- As to this reply, your solutions are doable - but inadequate. What the hell would a developing world only internet be good for ? We want to cross the digital divide, not completely segregate ourselves from the developed world.
We need to be able to reach an equal footing to europe and america, not make the rift bigger.
Sure we can build chips here - we have the know-how and the infrastructure allready - but who can buy them here ? They are useless unless we can sell them to the rest of the world as well. Voila - problems if everybody else expects a chip with built-in encryption levels which we cannot get to duplicate because of export restrictions.
---------- The point is however broader than that, this effort will broaden the digital divide by increasingly placing technollogy out of reach of the developing world (and I don't mean just Africa I use it as an example since I live here and travel all over this continent seeking to improve things)
Have a look at http://netday.org.za to get a feel for what we are doing. Paladium will also pose a very real threat to privacy and freedomn - maybe some Americans believe that they can prevent it being used for that. What about the many developing countries where these rights are not even recognized. Do you honestly believe that Robert Mugabe would NOT use this software to further erradicate freedomn in Zimbabwe. I know he would do it in an instant - just like so many others.
Sometimes Americans can be total hipocrites ( a stereotype I know and I appologize to the innocent) on the one hand you have people proposing laws to ensure the freedomns of people in the developing world by make net censorship impossible. On the other hand you have companies and the goverment pushing a technology that will leave the freedomn of all computer users completely up the whim of goverments.
This is bad for the developing world..NET is horrible for our countries because even if you ignore it's other ramifications, it still requires you to be online to work - do you realized how easilly being online for more than an hour a day in South-Africa can cost you the equavelent of $2000 per month ? This is worse - because it would leave so little alternative.
I work for a South-Africa company that developes ultra-low-cost educational computer labs for schools. We have cut the cost of a computer-extended education by over 75% allready.
Nigeria, Zambia and Namibia are allready starting to use this. We are a profit company, but we all (including the owners) work for salaries and the net profits go into cutting the system cost even lower.
We work in close relation with non-profits and we are really doing something good to improve the quality and availabillity of a proper education in the developing world.
We achieved this by combining a low-cost broadband approach (satelite) with thin client systems. The children work on old 486 and p1's but the software actually runs on powerfull servers.
Everything we did is possible ONLY because of Linux. If we were using a windows based solution, our labs would cost more than eight times their current price to build - that's just the licensing. Add the problem of windows requiring newer hardware than Linux and the cost at least doubles yet again. I know what I am talking about - I do this for a living.
The point then - we have to stop paladium.
This is but one example of how the developing countries are slowly starting to turn their economies around and breaking the cycle of destruction that started post-colonialism by using open-source systems to utilize their resouces better.
If we cannot run Linux and open office anymore - what can we do ? OK so we have no plans to upgrade these pc's in the next few years anyway but what happens when we have too ? What will we do if none of the over 2000 labs running on this system can send mail to anybody else anymore ? What will we do if the internet becomes so blocked up that our thin clients fail ? For that matter we will not be able to upgrade our servers to paladium level because we are talking about litterally hundreds of users needing access to the SAME programs and the SAME documents on the SAME machine - and none of this is illegal not even under the US DMCA.
I have allready begun rallying our non-profit partners and will continue to do so - our collective voice does get heard at the UN level (they in fact have paid for many of those labs). Africa cannot survive if paladium goes through. Bill Gates may not give a shit about that, but I do - this is my home !
For all those here who have been telling us this is a good thing(tm) - spare a thought for Africa. We are trying to save our home - don't destroy it for the sake of the unholy wood.
Yes I know that the current laws say quite the opposite but this was never truly thought through.
The reason is simple binary software is not a copyrightable product - it does not confrom the fundamental rule with regard to copyright - it applies to human understandable material.
Think about it, binary software CANNOT by any reasonable means be understood (''read'') by a human being. Every other copyrightable work can - music, movies, books, paintings - every one of these things have MEANING. Even music without words have meaning - I doubt anybody would argue against that.
But binary software have no meaning - it is not a copyrightable work. Source code IS copyrightable - because it is a form of speech. It has MEANING, it can be understood. Open source is like a book - a written work understandable by people.
A binary software program is not unless the sources come with it. Selling only binary versions of a program can be compared to an author who writes a book - the book is obviously copyrighted. Now imagine the author meticulously paints black over every written page. The book is still a product of potential value (don't ask me for what) but it is deffinitely not copyrighted anymore. Not unless an unpainted version is available to the consumer.
I know this is not law, but can anybody give me a good reason why it shouldn't be ?
A windows CD is just that - a flat piece of plastic you buy which because it has the potential to increase the abillities of your computer. You can no more copyright that than you can copyright a frisbee (which by the way is a far more viable application for this particular piece of plastic).
Furthermore, by denying you the source, a company should lose out on AL the advantages of copyright. Microsoft should not be able to touch you for copying and distributing there CD's anymore than FORD can sue VOLVO for building an equally shitty car.
Which one of you bright American's want to forward this to your congressman ? I will gladly relinguish my copyright to you, in order that it may be the opinion of actual american voters.
F|rankly I have to concur here. XP sucks badly. Three times in the third week the system went into a dead crash. So far the only thing I can find seem to be a corrupt mp3 somewhere in my collection that makes winamp go bonkers - but then again the same happened whilest in games without mp3's a couple of times. And what's worse is that you don't even get the (minute) oppurtunity its predecessors had offered to kill the haywire app. The whole system goes into a complete input ignored freeze and you are forced to do a hard reset.
WinXP only appears more stable because the no longer use a blue screen to advertise a crash - the just pretend it's your keyboard.
For the record I since wiped it and I am back to Linux only, the same mp3 list here - never ever seen xmms crashed (not to mention it sounds better)
Doesn't Britney Spears' CD explicity prohibit public exhibition anyway?
It does, too bad it doesn't apply to the rest of her. That would have ended the madness before it ever started:-)
What I think is needed, is a global initiative to support indy music, doing the same job as the RIAA but offering indy broadcasters a fair deal on the material - voila indy artist's get paid and played, indy broadcasters get listened too - Britney et all goes out of business - everybody wins.
About three years ago I was working with the imutable Wolf Kotze on a criminal database for the South-African police. It was a SCO/NT/Linux based program with an SQL backend. The code was later running into the tens of thousands of lines so we got into the habit of using the word FUCK in every single error message. The reason being that it allowed you to get to the error generation code (the parts where ninety percent of your debugging happens) with a simple text search.
We also kept another set of 'proper ' error messages in a sepperate file, complete with a script to replace them in the code automagically, this way our code would have the funny fuck messages, but the code we shipped would not.
Of course there was a bug in our script and it left one in. So one night, around three in the morning, my phone rings: 'Hello Venter speaking' 'Mr. Venter, this is Sargeant Willis of the Sunnyside Police Station.' 'Uh yeah ?' 'You are listed as the guy to call if we have problems with the computer system ?' 'Yes ? Can you tell me what's wrong ?' 'It says: No you've gone and fucked the whole system you dimwitted moron !'
Needless to say I the next day I went looking for new employment.
Well I use RedHat for work (I am a self-employed Linux coder) and slackware for myself. You cannot sell slackware to a business, it is just not designed for it - which does not make it bad btw. It is in my opinion one of the greatest Linux distro's out there. I have been using slackware since the time when kernel versions started on 0 and I still love it. But it isn't designed for non-geeks, it is good that we have geek distro's surviving. Debian is great too - now if only they would have a release often enough so you could have a semi-up-to-date software set without spending hundreds of bux on your net connection (in South-Africa you pay per minute so it is a real issue).
I am actually a great LFS fan and ran it for a long time, same problem though, you need to be online more than I can afford to do it.
Slackware is briliant in that respect, nothing is forced on you, you can modify it anyway you want with little risk of breaking things, and there's a new CD out fairly frequently.
There is however one part of my business where I get to uses slack, custom systems, there is a lot of work in this area amongst SME's and the fact is simply that for this job slack kicks butt as a startoff platform.
Well I am South-African as well, and I happen to be white. I also happen to have been a wize-ass nine-year old when Apartheid ended. Why on earth should I pay for the mistakes (and it was a mistake - not a deliberate infringement on human rights but a failed attempt to guarantee it) that my father and grandfather voted for ? And it is also true that when they voted for it, they didn't know about the cruelties that were being done onto people - this stuff was so secret F.W. De Klerk didn't know about it. It is simply not fair that I should have trouble finding work because of the bush-war - it was over for five years before I even knew it had ever happened - the ANC does not realize the extent of the culture of silence that had led to these atrocities.
Now here we are, ten years later, still blaming every possible social problem on the past. It is not because of appartheid that I was stabbed in the chest with a knife while'st walking my girlfriend to the buss-stop. If appartheid made the perp poor, he could have had my wallet, he did not need to try and kill me. This culture of violence if anything is exasperated by a very flawed goverment.
We have a goverment here, that seeks to controll everything the rich 20% amongst us has, and let everything else take a nose-dive to hell. Within the goverment a breach is threatening over their economic policies - exactly in line with what the multinationals would like, rather than what we as a nation need.
I call myself a patriot - I love my country, but patriotism does not mean I need to love my goverment. Those who have read my other posts in the past will know how liberal I am - but the ANC isn't a liberal goverment despite their claims to the contrary.
This ridiculous notion is exactly akin to the fiasco earlier this year when they tried to steal control of the.za namespace. They almost put every ISP in the country out of business that time.
South-Africa it is often said has two economies, the white first-world and the black third-world economy. Apparently the goverment is convinced that they cannot every get everyone to share in the first-world economy, so instead they are systematically trying to destroy the first world economy here and make everyone poor.
Surely this is not clever - the economic and social policies we are implementing (including this one and such other famous things as the nevirapien and Sarafina 2 bugger-ups) are to the detriment of all.
The rich 20% (which unlike the goverements claims are in fact not even nearly a pure white group) is the only thing keeping the poor 80% alive, we provide the buffer that allows charities to run here, we are the only reason this country doesn't have the massive starvation rates already prevalent in the rest of africa. We provide the management skills (because we were blessed enough to get an education) that allows the majority of our forreign aid to get to it's intended recipients (where else does that happen ?)
Yes this is a rant, a rant by someone who hates seeing his beautifull homeland being destroyed bit by bit. Freedomn is gone - the goverment has actually begun arresting activist under censorship laws still on the books after being passed in the worst part of the 80's by the apartheid regime. Our economy is no more free than 15 years ago, except now nobody wins.
The only actually rich people left in this country is the corrupt officials - did you know that 90% of the cabinet ministers pay their domestic workers less than half the minimum wage ? They set that wage, and now they are breaking the law.
OK, I am going to stop now before I go any further offtopic.
PS - The highest earning ethnic group in the country are in fact the Indian population according to a recent study by the University of South-Africa.
Imagine what this could do if somebody figures out how to create a holographic live webcam - and then couples it with cyberdildonics.... Wanted: One rich investor to pay me for developing it. A lot of hot uninhibited girls who are not morally opposed to being monetarilly exploited. Come join my soon to exist, dynamic company as we strive to bring the world the ultimate in relationship ruination.
I work as a system administrator for an ISP, but I also sometimes help out the hardware techs in our sister company when things are quite over here. In my life I have never EVER owned a prebuilt PC, I have put together every one of them myself (the first one was an old 286 Xt which I got the parts for as a 7th birthday present). I cannot get why anybody would want a computer that was prefab'ed. Working with the techs I am repeatedly amazed at how badly ALL prefab computers suck. They always use the cheapest parts, usually have some shortcuts taken in the built process (like the screwing the motherboard to the case on top of the packing foam rather than mounting it on the screws - completely shutting of the MB's rear airflow - man does that ever cause smokers). Hence I have no plans to change my policy. However I do feel that you shouldn't buy online, shipping is expensive at least. Call up your buddy who works for a computer company and have him bye it for you on the company account at wholesale prices - then just pay him back. Every computer I ever owned was bought that way, often at a third of regular prices, and I ONLY buy good-brand hardware like Creative and NVidia.
Final note on MB's: If it comes with builtin VGA - DO NOT BUY - man that sucks soooo bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Overrated ????
W.T.F. Everything I said is true. Does the truth hurt - or could you just not figure out what an 'equinal-sustainance-acceptance device' was ?
Doped out mods...what fun.
Hear hear, mod parent up.
Now let me get the rest of you people straight.
You refuse to considder a license open source until debian includes something that uses it ?
Well great there goes the entire open-source dream... to hell and no handbasket to make it comfortable.
Just for the sake of the Debianophiles who came up with this new way to beg for a LART'ing I should point out some facts:
One of the chief Debian Developers is also co-founder of the O.S.I - Ever hear of Rick Moen?
The O.S.I mission statement is the Debian Manifesto copied and pasted. Litterally, see www.tuxedo.org/~esr
Click on Revenge Of The Hackers,
Get it from the equinal-sustainance-acceptance device.
Ciao
A.J.
May my karma forgive me :-)
Company Fucker
Everybody knows to what tune to sing it
Shut your fucking face comp'ny fucker
your a cocksucking asslicking compny' fucker
you're a comp'ny fucker yes it's true
nobody fucks comp'nys quite like you
Shut your fucking face comp'ny fucker
your the one that fucked your comp'ny comp'ny fucker
You don't eat or sleep or mow the lawn you just fuck your comp'ny all day long
Comp'ny...Fucker....Comp'ny...Fucker
You're a comp'ny fucker I must say
You fucked your comp'ny yesterday
A fuck it.
Why not free ? Simple so people like my countryman Mark Shuttleworth can become bilionaires and visit the ISS.
You know when he sold thawte, he gave every employee (including the gardenere) a Milion bucks. U.S.
I guess I am peeved at myself, the guy offered me a job two months before thawte boomed into South-Africa's largest IT success story. At the time nobody had a clue who thawte.com was. And I told him to stuff his job up his posterior.
Oh well, back to grinding out code in blazing Nigeria, thank all that is holy I am going home on Saturday.
I just want to finally shut up everybody who thinks you can't get paid to write open-source.
I started my programming career 4 years ago. Using Linux at home, working on and for windows doing closed source programming. I earned a small salary, went out and got drunk. Suffered a nervous breakdown.
Nowadays I work for another company. My bosses don't tell me what to do. I tell them what I did.
I work on my own schedule. I get to travel all over the world. I get paid a huge salary (three and a half times what I used to earn). In fact after paying ALL my requisite expenses and my taxes I have 60% off my income left - which is about enough to buy six PS2's around here. As long as the product works my bosses are happy.
The code I write is all GPL'd, all copyrighted to me (though I do more than just program) and I get paid to write it.
See my linked homepage, check out direqcafe for an example of a program did under this contract.
The biggest surprize of all, I live in Pretoria, and work in Johannesburg South-Africa.
All hail the penguin, it has been my salvation.
Would that be an up or a down mod ?
If not up you had better specify, aint no one on slashdot gonna figure that one out.
Reminds me of the time I went to one of our local stores (around here we call it Incredible Corruption) to get some blank CD's for burning some new distro release on.
Out of curiosity I ask the salesmen,
"Do you sell any Linux box sets around here"
"No we don't"
"Oh allright."
Then the moron hands me my my CD's in an incredible corruption printed shopping bag. Advertising their special on RedHat Linux boxed sets.
I tend to agree with you. South-Africa has a different perspective, everybody sees IT as easy many, so hundreds of people study it. Most drop out. The larger percentage of those who don't - are pathetic programmers. And there is a 50/50 gender distribution.
The best programmers will always be the hackers, I don't say that because I am one. Just like any field, the road to excellence runs through passion.
Hackers have that passion.
They have a certain personality type. Those woman who do become programmers tend to be at the very top of their field here. I suspect this is
because once the woman learn that they are not passionate about computers, they find something else to do.
The men stick around for the cash.
The woman who do stick around are hackers.
The hacker community has always been very gender neutral. And this gender neutrality should attract woman, if it doesn't it can only be because the hacker personality is for some reason or other less prevalent among woman.
So be it. The world would be a lot better off if all the male-non-hackers were doing something else with them.
Sara, you are now on my friends list. I always liked woman who digged tech.
Cease and Desist Letter:
From Some-Random-Lawfirm,
To whom it may concern:
You the author of [insert novel title] are hereby required to cease and desist in all further attempts to distribute this work under U.S. Copyright law.
Your book forms part of a class of fiction known commonly as realistic, which is based on the real world.
Our client, God, the creator of the World, the Heavens and The Orgasm and sole copyright holder to these works have ordered us to stop the rampant abuse of his copyright.
It was previously erroneosly thought that since these creations are bilions of years old, they have moved into the public domain. However the U.S. Congress has made clear it's believe that copyright laws are perpetual and furthermore that these new clauses are retroactively applicable.
Compare: The Sonny Bono Act of 1999.
Therefore all works of fiction and non-fiction (specifically those classified as 'science') in any media based upon or including images of these creations, have had their orriginal copyrights restored.
God has decided that, under certain conditions licenses may be obtained to publish derivative works provided they do not in any way contradict the accompanying users manual (Commonly called The Bible) and that full negotiable royalties are paid.
Signed
Jack The Ripoffer
Attorney at Law.
of that episode of Ally Mcbeal where they suid the telemarketers ?
:-)
Well I only saw like ten minutes, my GF is a fan, I'm not, did they win ?
If they did - does that count as legal precedent
Anyway I guess we can safely asume that lawyers have moved beyond L.A. Law for inspiration....
SMART????
What website do you think your reading ?
This is slashdot -where real hackers argue with wannabees over woblygooks while the RW goes on in blissfull ignorance.
I fail to see slashdot as being a place to look for smart people - even the inteligent visitors come here 'coz they want a break from thinking.
I was working at an ISP a while back.
We had a mail/rad/DNS sever running of a 486 DX 66 with 20 mb's of ram and a 200mb hard drive.
Distro was Debian 2.2, cut down to bae bones.
The catch - at any given moment more than 3000 people was reading mail alone - and the system remained fast.
No X btw. VNC,SSH and Webmin (for the junior admins) was all we used.
We upgraded it just before I left when the loads started going to 10 thousand concurrent users.
Well I certainly never expected to be acused of being a ludite. I am a techno-geek of the first water. Which is exactly why I am opposed to paladium. Not just the potential for misuse but the severe potential for destroying innovation. The impact this could have on hobbyist programmers is frightening.
Finally someone sees a little about what I am trying to say here.
.NET is horrible for our countries because even if you ignore it's other ramifications, it still requires you to be online to work - do you realized how easilly being online for more than an hour a day in South-Africa can cost you the equavelent of $2000 per month ?
To clear up some points:
I never said that the UN would paladimize it's doc's I said that the UN could have some influence in stopping this from happening.
I said that having copyright systems on other people's machines limit WHO we can comunicate with will be a major problem.
I said that anything which forces us to upgrade will be a problem.
I said (based on RMS's book) that the inabillity to run ANY Software you want on new computers will be a major problem.
--
As to this reply, your solutions are doable - but inadequate.
What the hell would a developing world only internet be good for ? We want to cross the digital divide, not completely segregate ourselves from the developed world.
We need to be able to reach an equal footing to europe and america, not make the rift bigger.
Sure we can build chips here - we have the know-how and the infrastructure allready - but who can buy them here ? They are useless unless we can sell them to the rest of the world as well. Voila - problems if everybody else expects a chip with built-in encryption levels which we cannot get to duplicate because of export restrictions.
----------
The point is however broader than that, this effort will broaden the digital divide by increasingly placing technollogy out of reach of the developing world (and I don't mean just Africa I use it as an example since I live here and travel all over this continent seeking to improve things)
Have a look at http://netday.org.za to get a feel for what we are doing.
Paladium will also pose a very real threat to privacy and freedomn - maybe some Americans believe that they can prevent it being used for that. What about the many developing countries where these rights are not even recognized. Do you honestly believe that Robert Mugabe would NOT use this software to further erradicate freedomn in Zimbabwe. I know he would do it in an instant - just like so many others.
Sometimes Americans can be total hipocrites ( a stereotype I know and I appologize to the innocent) on the one hand you have people proposing laws to ensure the freedomns of people in the developing world by make net censorship impossible. On the other hand you have companies and the goverment pushing a technology that will leave the freedomn of all computer users completely up the whim of goverments.
This is bad for the developing world.
This is worse - because it would leave so little alternative.
I work for a South-Africa company that developes ultra-low-cost educational computer labs for schools. We have cut the cost of a computer-extended education by over 75% allready.
Nigeria, Zambia and Namibia are allready starting to use this. We are a profit company, but we all (including the owners) work for salaries and the net profits go into cutting the system cost even lower.
We work in close relation with non-profits and we are really doing something good to improve the quality and availabillity of a proper education in the developing world.
We achieved this by combining a low-cost broadband approach (satelite) with thin client systems. The children work on old 486 and p1's but the software actually runs on powerfull servers.
Everything we did is possible ONLY because of Linux. If we were using a windows based solution, our labs would cost more than eight times their current price to build - that's just the licensing. Add the problem of windows requiring newer hardware than Linux and the cost at least doubles yet again.
I know what I am talking about - I do this for a living.
The point then - we have to stop paladium.
This is but one example of how the developing countries are slowly starting to turn their economies around and breaking the cycle of destruction that started post-colonialism by using open-source systems to utilize their resouces better.
If we cannot run Linux and open office anymore - what can we do ?
OK so we have no plans to upgrade these pc's in the next few years anyway but what happens when we have too ?
What will we do if none of the over 2000 labs running on this system can send mail to anybody else anymore ?
What will we do if the internet becomes so blocked up that our thin clients fail ?
For that matter we will not be able to upgrade our servers to paladium level because we are talking about litterally hundreds of users needing access to the SAME programs and the SAME documents on the SAME machine - and none of this is illegal not even under the US DMCA.
I have allready begun rallying our non-profit partners and will continue to do so - our collective voice does get heard at the UN level (they in fact have paid for many of those labs). Africa cannot survive if paladium goes through.
Bill Gates may not give a shit about that, but I do - this is my home !
For all those here who have been telling us this is a good thing(tm) - spare a thought for Africa. We are trying to save our home - don't destroy it for the sake of the unholy wood.
Touchè
But how was I to know - I am not into cars.
Though I guess that explains WHY volvo is equally shitty.
I might as well have said BMW or GM.
In case anybody was wondering - I drive and will always drive a volkswagon.
Yes I know that the current laws say quite the opposite but this was never truly thought through.
The reason is simple binary software is not a copyrightable product - it does not confrom the fundamental rule with regard to copyright - it applies to human understandable material.
Think about it, binary software CANNOT by any reasonable means be understood (''read'') by a human being. Every other copyrightable work can - music, movies, books, paintings - every one of these things have MEANING. Even music without words have meaning - I doubt anybody would argue against that.
But binary software have no meaning - it is not a copyrightable work. Source code IS copyrightable - because it is a form of speech. It has MEANING, it can be understood.
Open source is like a book - a written work understandable by people.
A binary software program is not unless the sources come with it. Selling only binary versions of a program can be compared to an author who writes a book - the book is obviously copyrighted. Now imagine the author meticulously paints black over every written page. The book is still a product of potential value (don't ask me for what) but it is deffinitely not copyrighted anymore. Not unless an unpainted version is available to the consumer.
I know this is not law, but can anybody give me a good reason why it shouldn't be ?
A windows CD is just that - a flat piece of plastic you buy which because it has the potential to increase the abillities of your computer.
You can no more copyright that than you can copyright a frisbee (which by the way is a far more viable application for this particular piece of plastic).
Furthermore, by denying you the source, a company should lose out on AL the advantages of copyright.
Microsoft should not be able to touch you for copying and distributing there CD's anymore than FORD can sue VOLVO for building an equally shitty car.
Which one of you bright American's want to forward this to your congressman ? I will gladly relinguish my copyright to you, in order that it may be the opinion of actual american voters.
It will be worth it for the entertainment value.
F|rankly I have to concur here. XP sucks badly. Three times in the third week the system went into a dead crash. So far the only thing I can find seem to be a corrupt mp3 somewhere in my collection that makes winamp go bonkers - but then again the same happened whilest in games without mp3's a couple of times.
And what's worse is that you don't even get the (minute) oppurtunity its predecessors had offered to kill the haywire app. The whole system goes into a complete input ignored freeze and you are forced to do a hard reset.
WinXP only appears more stable because the no longer use a blue screen to advertise a crash - the just pretend it's your keyboard.
For the record I since wiped it and I am back to Linux only, the same mp3 list here - never ever seen xmms crashed (not to mention it sounds better)
Ciao
Doesn't Britney Spears' CD explicity prohibit public exhibition anyway?
:-)
It does, too bad it doesn't apply to the rest of her. That would have ended the madness before it ever started
What I think is needed, is a global initiative to support indy music, doing the same job as the RIAA but offering indy broadcasters a fair deal on the material - voila indy artist's get paid and played, indy broadcasters get listened too - Britney et all goes out of business - everybody wins.
About three years ago I was working with the imutable Wolf Kotze on a criminal database for the South-African police. It was a SCO/NT/Linux based program with an SQL backend.
The code was later running into the tens of thousands of lines so we got into the habit of using the word FUCK in every single error message.
The reason being that it allowed you to get to the error generation code (the parts where ninety percent of your debugging happens) with a simple text search.
We also kept another set of 'proper ' error messages in a sepperate file, complete with a script to replace them in the code automagically, this way our code would have the funny fuck messages, but the code we shipped would not.
Of course there was a bug in our script and it left one in.
So one night, around three in the morning, my phone rings:
'Hello Venter speaking'
'Mr. Venter, this is Sargeant Willis of the Sunnyside Police Station.'
'Uh yeah ?'
'You are listed as the guy to call if we have problems with the computer system ?'
'Yes ? Can you tell me what's wrong ?'
'It says: No you've gone and fucked the whole system you dimwitted moron !'
Needless to say I the next day I went looking for new employment.
Ciao
Well I use RedHat for work (I am a self-employed Linux coder) and slackware for myself.
You cannot sell slackware to a business, it is just not designed for it - which does not make it bad btw.
It is in my opinion one of the greatest Linux distro's out there. I have been using slackware since the time when kernel versions started on 0 and I still love it. But it isn't designed for non-geeks, it is good that we have geek distro's surviving.
Debian is great too - now if only they would have a release often enough so you could have a semi-up-to-date software set without spending hundreds of bux on your net connection (in South-Africa you pay per minute so it is a real issue).
I am actually a great LFS fan and ran it for a long time, same problem though, you need to be online more than I can afford to do it.
Slackware is briliant in that respect, nothing is forced on you, you can modify it anyway you want with little risk of breaking things, and there's a new CD out fairly frequently.
There is however one part of my business where I get to uses slack, custom systems, there is a lot of work in this area amongst SME's and the fact is simply that for this job slack kicks butt as a startoff platform.
Ciao
A.J.
Well I am South-African as well, and I happen to be white. I also happen to have been a wize-ass nine-year old when Apartheid ended. Why on earth should I pay for the mistakes (and it was a mistake - not a deliberate infringement on human rights but a failed attempt to guarantee it) that my father and grandfather voted for ?
.za namespace. They almost put every ISP in the country out of business that time.
And it is also true that when they voted for it, they didn't know about the cruelties that were being done onto people - this stuff was so secret F.W. De Klerk didn't know about it.
It is simply not fair that I should have trouble finding work because of the bush-war - it was over for five years before I even knew it had ever happened - the ANC does not realize the extent of the culture of silence that had led to these atrocities.
Now here we are, ten years later, still blaming every possible social problem on the past. It is not because of appartheid that I was stabbed in the chest with a knife while'st walking my girlfriend to the buss-stop. If appartheid made the perp poor, he could have had my wallet, he did not need to try and kill me. This culture of violence if anything is exasperated by a very flawed goverment.
We have a goverment here, that seeks to controll everything the rich 20% amongst us has, and let everything else take a nose-dive to hell. Within the goverment a breach is threatening over their economic policies - exactly in line with what the multinationals would like, rather than what we as a nation need.
I call myself a patriot - I love my country, but patriotism does not mean I need to love my goverment. Those who have read my other posts in the past will know how liberal I am - but the ANC isn't a liberal goverment despite their claims to the contrary.
This ridiculous notion is exactly akin to the fiasco earlier this year when they tried to steal control of the
South-Africa it is often said has two economies, the white first-world and the black third-world economy. Apparently the goverment is convinced that they cannot every get everyone to share in the first-world economy, so instead they are systematically trying to destroy the first world economy here and make everyone poor.
Surely this is not clever - the economic and social policies we are implementing (including this one and such other famous things as the nevirapien and Sarafina 2 bugger-ups) are to the detriment of all.
The rich 20% (which unlike the goverements claims are in fact not even nearly a pure white group) is the only thing keeping the poor 80% alive, we provide the buffer that allows charities to run here, we are the only reason this country doesn't have the massive starvation rates already prevalent in the rest of africa. We provide the management skills (because we were blessed enough to get an education) that allows the majority of our forreign aid to get to it's intended recipients (where else does that happen ?)
Yes this is a rant, a rant by someone who hates seeing his beautifull homeland being destroyed bit by bit. Freedomn is gone - the goverment has actually begun arresting activist under censorship laws still on the books after being passed in the worst part of the 80's by the apartheid regime.
Our economy is no more free than 15 years ago, except now nobody wins.
The only actually rich people left in this country is the corrupt officials - did you know that 90% of the cabinet ministers pay their domestic workers less than half the minimum wage ? They set that wage, and now they are breaking the law.
OK, I am going to stop now before I go any further offtopic.
PS - The highest earning ethnic group in the country are in fact the Indian population according to a recent study by the University of South-Africa.
Imagine what this could do if somebody figures out how to create a holographic live webcam - and then couples it with cyberdildonics....
Wanted: One rich investor to pay me for developing it. A lot of hot uninhibited girls who are not morally opposed to being monetarilly exploited.
Come join my soon to exist, dynamic company as we strive to bring the world the ultimate in relationship ruination.
I work as a system administrator for an ISP, but I also sometimes help out the hardware techs in our sister company when things are quite over here.
In my life I have never EVER owned a prebuilt PC, I have put together every one of them myself (the first one was an old 286 Xt which I got the parts for as a 7th birthday present).
I cannot get why anybody would want a computer that was prefab'ed. Working with the techs I am repeatedly amazed at how badly ALL prefab computers suck.
They always use the cheapest parts, usually have some shortcuts taken in the built process (like the screwing the motherboard to the case on top of the packing foam rather than mounting it on the screws - completely shutting of the MB's rear airflow - man does that ever cause smokers).
Hence I have no plans to change my policy.
However I do feel that you shouldn't buy online, shipping is expensive at least.
Call up your buddy who works for a computer company and have him bye it for you on the company account at wholesale prices - then just pay him back.
Every computer I ever owned was bought that way, often at a third of regular prices, and I ONLY buy good-brand hardware like Creative and NVidia.
Final note on MB's: If it comes with builtin VGA - DO NOT BUY - man that sucks soooo bad.
Walk to back of box.
Unscrew Cable.
Unplug Power Lead from box.
Carry monitor away.
Guess what - nothing broken in the process.
/me stomps of to his corner wondering why on earth anybody would want a bloody mac.