I stopped using Windows and every other M$ product in 1995 when I left an M$ enslaved company to venture out on my own. From that time forward to this, everytime I am forced to go back to use Windows I am always struck by the fact that the Windows vaunted `friendliness' is a myth,
People are just used to it. Those of us who have successfully beaten the M$ addiction wonder what the attraction is. To me, I find Windows too limiting.
If the whole world would simply go "cold turkey" the world will soon be rid of that terrible dream called Microsoft that has been the main contributor to the fact that software technology is fifteen years behind where it ought to be.
There is no need for CoLinux or anything else along those lines. The cure is simply to stop using all Microsoft products and end the slavery and addiction.
I had an Amiga since 1985 with a serial number less than 100. It was cool for 1985 and had so much potential. There were even a whole gaggle of Unix projects to try and replace the Tripos operating system which stunk up the place.
If only it had an MMU, there would have been linux before linux and Amiga would rule the world by now.
By 1990 I threw out the Amiga mostly because of the politics and a few years later I discovered linux. Now it's linux that's set to rule the world.
The Amiga is the poster child about how to develop leading edge technology into oblivion. That and the AT&T's decision to impose it's copyright over the Unix source code allowing Bill Gates to literally stop software development for 15 years.
You've made two contradictory statements here. If competition works very well when applied to biological entities how can the result be quite random?
Evolution, as a theory, is still very much in its infancy and scientists still have only just scratched the surface. That, unfortunately, hasn't stopped certain people and groups from misapplying scientific theories to their own ends. The Social Darwinists come to mind where they asserted that the rich were superior because they had successfully adapted to the economic environment and that success is hereditary.
When it comes to applying science to social situations, it is all pseudo-science that I take with a grain of salt.
1. That competition is good and is to be encouraged. This is nonsense. Competition fosters only an attitude of winning at all costs. That is why you have illegal drug use in sports and 85% of all CEOs who think that their books are cooked. Comepition is an objective moral evil.
2. That innovation is best accomplished in a proprietary environment. Well, that old canard has been laid to rest long ago. Innovation is best accomplished in an open and free environment. The best that a closed environment can ever hope to accomplish is to create a better mousetrap. The vision to create the original mousetrap came from outside the crippling corporate environment. It takes vision to get to the stars, and corporatists have proved time and again that they simply do not have that kind of vision.
3. That barrier free trade is good. This is the greatest falacy of them all. The only thing that free trade has accomplished is a lower standard of living for all. Corporatists flog free trade because it is good for them, but corporatists have their loyalties only to their corporations and not to their community or nation. Corporatists, and the corporations they run, are traitors. The same goes for the politicians that support them.
If you accept these things are true, you too are a corporate shill. Stand up and think for yourself and stop swollowing the corporatist propaganda.
I agree with some other posters who have noted that the author is trying to be controversial, or he is ignorant. Not so much ignorance of Open Source, but ignorance of software development practices in general.
There is no issue he does not raise that applies ten times over to a closed source project. Perhaps he's never been involved in a large scale software project. If he had been, he'd know that unless a company has software quality control procedures that are in place and practiced, and audited regularily, anything and everything is possible and does happen.
In the end, a customer has to trust the software house that it has these quality practices in place, that it follows them and that there are appropriate controls in place to ensure that they do. There are even standards, such as ISO 9000-3, that can be followed, but in the United States at least there is great resistence to adopting such standards which means ultimately you cannot trust any closed source software not developed under internationally recognized quality assurance standards. Period.
The author ends with the question "who watches the watchers?" In closed source development, unless they're compliant to independently verifiable quality assurance standards, the answer is simple. Nobody.
you can remember with fondness the original "Dr. Who" and think that William Hartnell was the only "true" doctor. After that, even the original "Star Trek" series pales into insignificance.
I remember racing home from school each afternoon to see what trouble the Doctor would get himself into or whether he would recover the key to his Tardis (the original Doctor lost the key quite a lot).
"Dr. Who" is real science fiction. "Star Trek" is future history. Everything else doesn't count.
True enough. But one may logically ask the question whether the ultimate receiver of the said SPAM could turn around and send a bill to the spammer for wasted bandwidth, lost productivity in having to deal with SPAM and even an accounting charge for the CPU time and disk storage necessary for your system to accept, process, filter (if you have one) and ultimately deliver it.
Might be worth thinking about. In fact, SPAM filters might be fitted with routines to do this sort of accounting. Finally, a group of SPAM victims could then get together and launch a class action suit against those individuals and organizations involved in SPAMming.
I don't know if this is really a trend, but I've noticed that many people who go by their middle names are conservative of some stripe or other.
Many prominent conservative leaders here in Canada go by their middle names, including two past Prime Ministers: Charles Joseph (Joe) Clark and Martin Brian Mulroney.
Can something similar be said of American conservatives?
My own family didn't have last names until after the First World War and the loss land and power after that war. We were identified by our membership in particular Royal houses. We were addressed as Emperor, or King, or Duke, or Prince with the appropriate titles that went with it.
With the First World War and beginning with the English Royal Family abandoning it's German roots by adopting the name of Windsor, they set the tone for the dismantling of the house system. My great-great-granduncle, German Kaiser Wilhelm II at the time of the English abandonment of their heritage, remarked that he always enjoyed the comic operetta "The Merry Wives of Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha," a reference to the British Royal family's true German name. Two of those house names are also part of my name.
My own grandfather, an Archduke in the Austrian Empire had to abandon his titles and adopted a name that was taken from the name of the his ancestral home in the south of Austria. He was later appraoched by Hitler to help with the union of Austria and Germany, but categorically refused him. After the anschlus in 1938 his vocal anti-Nazi stance got him into more trouble and his lands were seized.
This is all probably not very interesting, and I'll probably loose a few karma point by this post. But who cares? There is no such thing as Karma anyway.
Canada's lumber is cheaper because the lumber industry spent tens of millions of dollars on new equipment and research into better harvesting techniques that don't decimate the forests. The US lumber industry is still stuck in the 1950's with labour intensive harvesting techniques and equipment.
Canada has more trees, not only because we're a much larger country, but also because we replant the forests after they've been cut. We've been doing that since the 1960's. The American Lumber Industry keeps spending their money on lobbying the governments instead of replanting the forests and modernization.
Canada's so-called dumping of forestry products in the US is simply crass politics which have nothing to do with reality. It is the US's imposing of the tarriffs that are illegal
Despite all the crap from Americans about free enterpirse and free trade, the US is the world's most tarriff protected nation. As long as the balance of trade remains positive for them, they are happy. As soon as a foreign country, such as Canada, reverses that trend, up go the tarrifs.
What ever happened to NAFTA, you ask? Obviously it's nothing but smoke for the American government since they still slap tarriffs on us. Only now with NAFTA we can prove that they are illegal.
You know, the old "Never ascribe to stupidity that which is adequately explained by incompetence." And of course we all know that Microsoft is *never* incompetent... no sirree, not a bit!
While I applaud Opera's sense of humour, and I also am no fan of Microsoft I just wonder if this is all rather misplaced.
People, as a species, are not in the very least intelligent, and all advances that mankind enjoys required the divine inspiration of genius to accomplish anything at all. Incompetence and stupidy are par for the course for the animal.
While I personally would like to believe in Microsoft's duplicity on feeding Opera browsers bad pages, it is far more likely that this is a case of stupidity or incompetence or both. Mind you, it is possible that Microsoft has deliberately done this dastardly deed, but for those who believe in conspiracy theories, there are far better ones out there.
If people are going to use this as an excuse to prevent IE browsers from accessing their webpages, I can only ask why didn't they start doing it sooner? Microsoft has done far worse deeds in the past for which anybody with a moral outlook could take policial action against. Such minor deals as this hardly even registers on the radar of Microsoft's turpitude.
I heartily endorce people refusing to permit the IE browser from viewing their web pages, possibly with a banner supporting Open Source/Software Libre. From my perspective, such a position is a legitimate anti-monopoly political action statement. But if you are moved to act by this minor infraction, if it was indeed a deliberate move on the part of the Evil Empire, your own moral compass was out of whack for too long to begin with.
But there is much also to be said for another old saying, "the straw that broke the camel's back."
In fact, slow growth in the economy impacts all kinds of sales, including Microsoft's products.
You're right about that. But you also have to take into account that it is in a sluggish economy that management are looking for cost savings of all kinds. In times like these, OSS begins to look really attractive. If the difference between OSS and Microsoft amounts to significant amounts of money, and it does, then management will look at it.
What's going to keep management sold on OSS is going to be the bottom line. The power base of any largish corporation is the finance departments and they aren't really that concerned about technical merit. Unless it comes on their radar as having an impact on their financial numbers, it doesn't really matter to them.
In times like this, the bottom line becomes an incentive to switch to OSS. When times are good, and everybody is making bags and bags of money, wasting money on Microsoft isn't that big a deal. In a down economy it does.
The old stereotype that I've heard often enough from management types that "if it costs a lot it must be good" is slowly beginning to be debunked, at least where software is concerned. Debunking that myth becomes crucial to the continued acceptance of OSS after the economy bounces back and companies once more have money to spend.
The trick will be that when the good times come back, and they always do, will OSS still be as attractive to the money people? I'm hoping, and many people are betting, that they will.
According to the copy of the agreement, "Northwest Linux may terminate the Agreement at any time and for any reason by prividing written notice of termination and refunding a pro rata portion of fees paid by Customer to Northwest Link for servies not yet rendered."
It doesn't say "prior written notice" but simply "written notice." That means that they can pull the plug on you at any time and tell you why afterwards.
It's interesting that the previous sentence says "either party" can terminate only for breaches of the contract that are not corrected within 15 days. In reality that only applies to Customer since the next sentence authorizes Northwest Link to do whatever it feels like doing.
Anyway, we only have half the story. It would be nice to see what Northwest Link has to say.
The Programming Language as Operating System is old news. Remember Smalltalk out of Xerox? How about APL\360 which is a language and an OS.
Other posters have remarked on Java and the possibilities there. Then there is Forth which is also a language and an operating system rolled into one.
The prediction of the lanaguge rolled into operating system talking over has been made before, The thing that inevitably happens is that somebody, some day will have a need for a computer to do something new and unique and then have to throw out all the existing computing constructs.
The magic of Unix is the fact that the operating system itself was designed to allow programmers to do new and interesting things using the tools they need -- or create -- to do the job.
In the end, I predict that it is Unix that will take over and not any single language. It is Unix that will be used to create the next latest and greatest, and Linux will become the Unix of choice.
Personally if you are really interested in helping that research along, rather than risk the ire of your management, you should be using your computer @home. Supposedly it's doing nothing while you are at work supposedly doing useful stuff.
This sort of research is useful, unlike the SETI@home stuff which is purporting to find intelligent life in the universe. I can tell you right now, they won't find it. That's because they are looking for evidence of human-like `civilization' and not intelligent life.
Well, they said that man could never fly and that he would never make it to the moon. Linux on mainframes IS a good idea, especially when someone says that it isn't.
So what if those who have a vested interest cook up reasons that say it can't or shouldn't be done? The more they rail against it, the more someone will find a good reason that it could and that it should.
Let them fume and sputter all they want. Linux has already changed the world, and for the better too. Sun's self interested objections leave me unmoved.
I especially like this suggestion which the author suggests as a paradigm shift: "Let's completely modularize each tool function (such as layout, fonts, kerning, textures, linking, math and tables) and make each a separate interactive GUI tool. Like an erector set, applications could be constructed for specific needs. And like hammers, saws, wrenches and screwdrivers in the physical realm, such tools are easier to utilize than large factories (or contemporary application programs)."
This is the classic call to arms of Unix, way back when. "Build a tool that does one job, and does that job well." And then make the tools work together. Unix was originally built for programmers, but there is no reason to believe that "ordinary users" cannot benefit from that philosophy as well.
I say, go back to first principles, and we all win. It worked for hardware in the 1980's with the advent of RISC technology. Software too has become too bloated.
To be quite frank, slashdot was more useful and more fun in the early days when there were not as many "subscribers." Back then it was one of my favourite places to get news. I even thought the stupid polls were fun.
Now, after all the changes, I find that most of what is on slashdot no longer has much relevance to me. Instead of being a daily slashdotter, I come maybe once a week.
There are other issues as well that keep me away, but I'm not going to bitch and complain too much.
Sure, having a premium service might make some sense, if your overall service was up to snuff. But right now, as it stands and for my needs, slashdot is hardly worth the investment of my time. It may soon no longer even be bookmarked in my browser.
If you mandate that I must do something then you are restricting my freedom. If you say "do what you want" then you are promoting more freedom than if you say "do what you want but...".
There is no true freedom without responsibility. "Doing what you want" is not freedom at all, but a license for anarchy and chaos.
Freedom and responsibility are intimately connected. Our modern culture seems to ignore the responsibility side of the coin. In reality you cannot possibly have freedom without also certain basic responsibilities to the larger society. In the GPL I see a nice balance between those two forces.
Monopolistic forces want the freedom without the requisite responsibility.
Actually, you're right. I misread the article and spoke out of turn. I guess I'm paying the price for it by the moderation. Sighhh..
However, I notice other posters talking about "BSD is best" and "use LGPL and retire your sofware" getting the "moderation of approval." They are just as off topic as me, yet for some reason the moderators like it.
I'm Offtopic, Flamebate, Troll and the others are Interesting, Insightful, etc.
I guess we know where most of the crowd here stands.
I suppose that this is the thin edge of the wedge of Corporate America into our world. Wine is one of many making the jump from the "freedom for everyone" GPL to the "freedom for producers" BSD license or other "less restrictive" licenses.
It's amazing how they call a license that mandates freedom and requires you to contribute to the common good "restrictive," and by contrast a license that allows others to poach and return nothing is labelled as "more free."
That ranks up there with Bill Gates talking about "freedom to innovate." Pure sophistry.
The sad part is that most people won't see anything wrong in this and, blinded by the almighty (American) dollar, jump onto the bandwagon.
It was inevitable I suppose, as Linux is now on the verge of making really big money and go toe-to-toe with Microsoft in a few years.
If the kinds of math you want to do is calculator style stuff then `bc' is my choice.
This old chestnut is an arbitrary precision desk calculator with a C-like programming syntax. So, if it's the sort of stuff that you would do in C/C++ or Java but to play with really large numbers, the bc is the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
I stopped using Windows and every other M$ product in 1995 when I left an M$ enslaved company to venture out on my own. From that time forward to this, everytime I am forced to go back to use Windows I am always struck by the fact that the Windows vaunted `friendliness' is a myth,
People are just used to it. Those of us who have successfully beaten the M$ addiction wonder what the attraction is. To me, I find Windows too limiting.
If the whole world would simply go "cold turkey" the world will soon be rid of that terrible dream called Microsoft that has been the main contributor to the fact that software technology is fifteen years behind where it ought to be.
There is no need for CoLinux or anything else along those lines. The cure is simply to stop using all Microsoft products and end the slavery and addiction.
I had an Amiga since 1985 with a serial number less than 100. It was cool for 1985 and had so much potential. There were even a whole gaggle of Unix projects to try and replace the Tripos operating system which stunk up the place.
If only it had an MMU, there would have been linux before linux and Amiga would rule the world by now.
By 1990 I threw out the Amiga mostly because of the politics and a few years later I discovered linux. Now it's linux that's set to rule the world.
The Amiga is the poster child about how to develop leading edge technology into oblivion. That and the AT&T's decision to impose it's copyright over the Unix source code allowing Bill Gates to literally stop software development for 15 years.
You've made two contradictory statements here. If competition works very well when applied to biological entities how can the result be quite random?
Evolution, as a theory, is still very much in its infancy and scientists still have only just scratched the surface. That, unfortunately, hasn't stopped certain people and groups from misapplying scientific theories to their own ends. The Social Darwinists come to mind where they asserted that the rich were superior because they had successfully adapted to the economic environment and that success is hereditary.
When it comes to applying science to social situations, it is all pseudo-science that I take with a grain of salt.
The BSA assumes three patently false notions:
1. That competition is good and is to be encouraged. This is nonsense. Competition fosters only an attitude of winning at all costs. That is why you have illegal drug use in sports and 85% of all CEOs who think that their books are cooked. Comepition is an objective moral evil.
2. That innovation is best accomplished in a proprietary environment. Well, that old canard has been laid to rest long ago. Innovation is best accomplished in an open and free environment. The best that a closed environment can ever hope to accomplish is to create a better mousetrap. The vision to create the original mousetrap came from outside the crippling corporate environment. It takes vision to get to the stars, and corporatists have proved time and again that they simply do not have that kind of vision.
3. That barrier free trade is good. This is the greatest falacy of them all. The only thing that free trade has accomplished is a lower standard of living for all. Corporatists flog free trade because it is good for them, but corporatists have their loyalties only to their corporations and not to their community or nation. Corporatists, and the corporations they run, are traitors. The same goes for the politicians that support them.
If you accept these things are true, you too are a corporate shill. Stand up and think for yourself and stop swollowing the corporatist propaganda.
I agree with some other posters who have noted that the author is trying to be controversial, or he is ignorant. Not so much ignorance of Open Source, but ignorance of software development practices in general.
There is no issue he does not raise that applies ten times over to a closed source project. Perhaps he's never been involved in a large scale software project. If he had been, he'd know that unless a company has software quality control procedures that are in place and practiced, and audited regularily, anything and everything is possible and does happen.
In the end, a customer has to trust the software house that it has these quality practices in place, that it follows them and that there are appropriate controls in place to ensure that they do. There are even standards, such as ISO 9000-3, that can be followed, but in the United States at least there is great resistence to adopting such standards which means ultimately you cannot trust any closed source software not developed under internationally recognized quality assurance standards. Period.
The author ends with the question "who watches the watchers?" In closed source development, unless they're compliant to independently verifiable quality assurance standards, the answer is simple. Nobody.
With Open Source, that's automatically built in.
you can remember with fondness the original "Dr. Who" and think that William Hartnell was the only "true" doctor. After that, even the original "Star Trek" series pales into insignificance.
I remember racing home from school each afternoon to see what trouble the Doctor would get himself into or whether he would recover the key to his Tardis (the original Doctor lost the key quite a lot).
"Dr. Who" is real science fiction. "Star Trek" is future history. Everything else doesn't count.
True enough. But one may logically ask the question whether the ultimate receiver of the said SPAM could turn around and send a bill to the spammer for wasted bandwidth, lost productivity in having to deal with SPAM and even an accounting charge for the CPU time and disk storage necessary for your system to accept, process, filter (if you have one) and ultimately deliver it.
Might be worth thinking about. In fact, SPAM filters might be fitted with routines to do this sort of accounting. Finally, a group of SPAM victims could then get together and launch a class action suit against those individuals and organizations involved in SPAMming.
I don't know if this is really a trend, but I've noticed that many people who go by their middle names are conservative of some stripe or other.
Many prominent conservative leaders here in Canada go by their middle names, including two past Prime Ministers: Charles Joseph (Joe) Clark and Martin Brian Mulroney.
Can something similar be said of American conservatives?
My own family didn't have last names until after the First World War and the loss land and power after that war. We were identified by our membership in particular Royal houses. We were addressed as Emperor, or King, or Duke, or Prince with the appropriate titles that went with it.
With the First World War and beginning with the English Royal Family abandoning it's German roots by adopting the name of Windsor, they set the tone for the dismantling of the house system. My great-great-granduncle, German Kaiser Wilhelm II at the time of the English abandonment of their heritage, remarked that he always enjoyed the comic operetta "The Merry Wives of Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha," a reference to the British Royal family's true German name. Two of those house names are also part of my name.
My own grandfather, an Archduke in the Austrian Empire had to abandon his titles and adopted a name that was taken from the name of the his ancestral home in the south of Austria. He was later appraoched by Hitler to help with the union of Austria and Germany, but categorically refused him. After the anschlus in 1938 his vocal anti-Nazi stance got him into more trouble and his lands were seized.
This is all probably not very interesting, and I'll probably loose a few karma point by this post. But who cares? There is no such thing as Karma anyway.
Nonsense!
Canada's lumber is cheaper because the lumber industry spent tens of millions of dollars on new equipment and research into better harvesting techniques that don't decimate the forests. The US lumber industry is still stuck in the 1950's with labour intensive harvesting techniques and equipment.
Canada has more trees, not only because we're a much larger country, but also because we replant the forests after they've been cut. We've been doing that since the 1960's. The American Lumber Industry keeps spending their money on lobbying the governments instead of replanting the forests and modernization.
Canada's so-called dumping of forestry products in the US is simply crass politics which have nothing to do with reality. It is the US's imposing of the tarriffs that are illegal
Despite all the crap from Americans about free enterpirse and free trade, the US is the world's most tarriff protected nation. As long as the balance of trade remains positive for them, they are happy. As soon as a foreign country, such as Canada, reverses that trend, up go the tarrifs.
What ever happened to NAFTA, you ask? Obviously it's nothing but smoke for the American government since they still slap tarriffs on us. Only now with NAFTA we can prove that they are illegal.
While I applaud Opera's sense of humour, and I also am no fan of Microsoft I just wonder if this is all rather misplaced.
People, as a species, are not in the very least intelligent, and all advances that mankind enjoys required the divine inspiration of genius to accomplish anything at all. Incompetence and stupidy are par for the course for the animal.
While I personally would like to believe in Microsoft's duplicity on feeding Opera browsers bad pages, it is far more likely that this is a case of stupidity or incompetence or both. Mind you, it is possible that Microsoft has deliberately done this dastardly deed, but for those who believe in conspiracy theories, there are far better ones out there.
If people are going to use this as an excuse to prevent IE browsers from accessing their webpages, I can only ask why didn't they start doing it sooner? Microsoft has done far worse deeds in the past for which anybody with a moral outlook could take policial action against. Such minor deals as this hardly even registers on the radar of Microsoft's turpitude.
I heartily endorce people refusing to permit the IE browser from viewing their web pages, possibly with a banner supporting Open Source/Software Libre. From my perspective, such a position is a legitimate anti-monopoly political action statement. But if you are moved to act by this minor infraction, if it was indeed a deliberate move on the part of the Evil Empire, your own moral compass was out of whack for too long to begin with.
But there is much also to be said for another old saying, "the straw that broke the camel's back."
You're right about that. But you also have to take into account that it is in a sluggish economy that management are looking for cost savings of all kinds. In times like these, OSS begins to look really attractive. If the difference between OSS and Microsoft amounts to significant amounts of money, and it does, then management will look at it.
What's going to keep management sold on OSS is going to be the bottom line. The power base of any largish corporation is the finance departments and they aren't really that concerned about technical merit. Unless it comes on their radar as having an impact on their financial numbers, it doesn't really matter to them.
In times like this, the bottom line becomes an incentive to switch to OSS. When times are good, and everybody is making bags and bags of money, wasting money on Microsoft isn't that big a deal. In a down economy it does. The old stereotype that I've heard often enough from management types that "if it costs a lot it must be good" is slowly beginning to be debunked, at least where software is concerned. Debunking that myth becomes crucial to the continued acceptance of OSS after the economy bounces back and companies once more have money to spend.
The trick will be that when the good times come back, and they always do, will OSS still be as attractive to the money people? I'm hoping, and many people are betting, that they will.
Damn all those spelling mistakes. I should get a new perscription for my glasses.
Boo hoo.
According to the copy of the agreement, "Northwest Linux may terminate the Agreement at any time and for any reason by prividing written notice of termination and refunding a pro rata portion of fees paid by Customer to Northwest Link for servies not yet rendered."
It doesn't say "prior written notice" but simply "written notice." That means that they can pull the plug on you at any time and tell you why afterwards.
It's interesting that the previous sentence says "either party" can terminate only for breaches of the contract that are not corrected within 15 days. In reality that only applies to Customer since the next sentence authorizes Northwest Link to do whatever it feels like doing.
Anyway, we only have half the story. It would be nice to see what Northwest Link has to say.
Tough luck.
The Programming Language as Operating System is old news. Remember Smalltalk out of Xerox? How about APL\360 which is a language and an OS.
Other posters have remarked on Java and the possibilities there. Then there is Forth which is also a language and an operating system rolled into one.
The prediction of the lanaguge rolled into operating system talking over has been made before, The thing that inevitably happens is that somebody, some day will have a need for a computer to do something new and unique and then have to throw out all the existing computing constructs.
The magic of Unix is the fact that the operating system itself was designed to allow programmers to do new and interesting things using the tools they need -- or create -- to do the job.
In the end, I predict that it is Unix that will take over and not any single language. It is Unix that will be used to create the next latest and greatest, and Linux will become the Unix of choice.
Oh, I forgot to mention: this stuff uses proprietary software rather than free software, so the purists amoung us will probably boycot it anyway.
Personally if you are really interested in helping that research along, rather than risk the ire of your management, you should be using your computer @home. Supposedly it's doing nothing while you are at work supposedly doing useful stuff.
This sort of research is useful, unlike the SETI@home stuff which is purporting to find intelligent life in the universe. I can tell you right now, they won't find it. That's because they are looking for evidence of human-like `civilization' and not intelligent life.
We laugh now, but don't be surprised if something like this comes to America or is already here.
It is. It's called Political Correctness.
... when you have detractors.
Well, they said that man could never fly and that he would never make it to the moon. Linux on mainframes IS a good idea, especially when someone says that it isn't.
So what if those who have a vested interest cook up reasons that say it can't or shouldn't be done? The more they rail against it, the more someone will find a good reason that it could and that it should.
Let them fume and sputter all they want. Linux has already changed the world, and for the better too. Sun's self interested objections leave me unmoved.
I especially like this suggestion which the author suggests as a paradigm shift: "Let's completely modularize each tool function (such as layout, fonts, kerning, textures, linking, math and tables) and make each a separate interactive GUI tool. Like an erector set, applications could be constructed for specific needs. And like hammers, saws, wrenches and screwdrivers in the physical realm, such tools are easier to utilize than large factories (or contemporary application programs)."
This is the classic call to arms of Unix, way back when. "Build a tool that does one job, and does that job well." And then make the tools work together. Unix was originally built for programmers, but there is no reason to believe that "ordinary users" cannot benefit from that philosophy as well.
I say, go back to first principles, and we all win. It worked for hardware in the 1980's with the advent of RISC technology. Software too has become too bloated.
To be quite frank, slashdot was more useful and more fun in the early days when there were not as many "subscribers." Back then it was one of my favourite places to get news. I even thought the stupid polls were fun.
Now, after all the changes, I find that most of what is on slashdot no longer has much relevance to me. Instead of being a daily slashdotter, I come maybe once a week.
There are other issues as well that keep me away, but I'm not going to bitch and complain too much.
Sure, having a premium service might make some sense, if your overall service was up to snuff. But right now, as it stands and for my needs, slashdot is hardly worth the investment of my time. It may soon no longer even be bookmarked in my browser.
If you mandate that I must do something then you are restricting my freedom. If you say "do what you want" then you are promoting more freedom than if you say "do what you want but...".
There is no true freedom without responsibility. "Doing what you want" is not freedom at all, but a license for anarchy and chaos.
Freedom and responsibility are intimately connected. Our modern culture seems to ignore the responsibility side of the coin. In reality you cannot possibly have freedom without also certain basic responsibilities to the larger society. In the GPL I see a nice balance between those two forces.
Monopolistic forces want the freedom without the requisite responsibility.
So what if it's mandated? So is paying taxes.
Actually, you're right. I misread the article and spoke out of turn. I guess I'm paying the price for it by the moderation. Sighhh..
However, I notice other posters talking about "BSD is best" and "use LGPL and retire your sofware" getting the "moderation of approval." They are just as off topic as me, yet for some reason the moderators like it.
I'm Offtopic, Flamebate, Troll and the others are Interesting, Insightful, etc.
I guess we know where most of the crowd here stands.
I suppose that this is the thin edge of the wedge of Corporate America into our world. Wine is one of many making the jump from the "freedom for everyone" GPL to the "freedom for producers" BSD license or other "less restrictive" licenses.
It's amazing how they call a license that mandates freedom and requires you to contribute to the common good "restrictive," and by contrast a license that allows others to poach and return nothing is labelled as "more free."
That ranks up there with Bill Gates talking about "freedom to innovate." Pure sophistry.
The sad part is that most people won't see anything wrong in this and, blinded by the almighty (American) dollar, jump onto the bandwagon.
It was inevitable I suppose, as Linux is now on the verge of making really big money and go toe-to-toe with Microsoft in a few years.
If the kinds of math you want to do is calculator style stuff then `bc' is my choice.
This old chestnut is an arbitrary precision desk calculator with a C-like programming syntax. So, if it's the sort of stuff that you would do in C/C++ or Java but to play with really large numbers, the bc is the way to go.