I have a couple of iPods. I think the software that runs on them, as well as iTunes itself, is pretty mediocre. But the widespread hardware support and the fact that I could plug them in to a Linux system and they just worked made all of that bearable.
With the iPod Touch and its proprietary hash, Apple has crossed the line. With Apple's own software, the iPod Touch can't even be moved between desktop and laptop, and I don't have any option anymore other than to use Apple's shitty iTunes software. My next video player is going to be something like an Archos 5, and for music, a simple $50 no-name player does just fine.
Software was believed to be unpatentable during the creation of UNIX - so no, GCC and BSD, etc were far better off than Mono, or Linux now.
Nonsense. BSD was under serious legal threats from AT&T.
You choose to assume good intent
I'm not assuming "good intent". Microsoft is one of the sleaziest companies around. They simply can't do anything to Mono.
I'm calling for cautious and skeptical analysis of everything MS does in light of their track record. My fears are justified, your blanket denials of things you can't know are not.
Your fears are not justified. Mono's patent situation is, if anything, considerably better known than most other FOSS. That doesn't mean it's risk free, it means it's no more risky than most other FOSS software.
You are simply spreading FUD, and at this point, one really has to wonder what the motives of people like you are. Do you get paid by Microsoft for spreading FUD about a competing FOSS project? Are you a KDE fanboy?
And while you find it amusing that we accept mandatory registration, I, for example, find it amusing that a U.S. citizen has to register himself in order to be able to carry out his most basic democratic right: voting.
In Germany, you don't need to register to vote because the government already knows so much about you anyway. Furthermore, Germans seem apathetic about it.
Voter registration exists in the US because the government doesn't know who you are, and it only involves the minimum amount of information necessary for the election. And it's an issue that people examine in detail every election.
Not that I like all of it, but some things sound much more scary than they are in practice.
In day to day life, those things indeed don't matter. They start mattering when the government starts abusing its power: politicians blackmailing rival politicians, totalitarian politicians coming to power, etc. By the time those things start mattering to you, it's too late.
Lots of parties, a parliamentary system, coalitions, and massive governmental data collection was what got Germany into trouble in the 1930's. What reason do we have to believe that it will be any better this time?
Germany has ex-communists and ex-Stasi in its parliament, and Nazi sympathizers have significant political influence.
n practice it seems to me like actually that's more privacy than you'd expect in the unregulated USA, where companies routinely sell customer data to the highest bidder
The US is not "unregulated". The US had data protection laws decades before Germany, and both governmental and private uses of data is regulated.
And you're naive if you think that the government and private dealing in personal data isn't going on at least as much in Germany. The difference is that in the US people make a stink about it.
Do you really think your data is more private if you don't have some clear laws about what the government and everyone else can do with it?
I think my data is more private if I don't have to give it out.
As for the last jab at the German government, let's just say that it's record has actually been pretty damn good since 1945. Yes, the Weimar republic had some weaker safeguards and it did fail once. We learned from that mistake and fixed the system.
The Weimar Republic itself was only the outcome of WWI. Democracy after WWII was imposed and managed by the victors, and has never faced any serious economic or political crisis. There were a few previous attempts at democracy, and they also failed. Furthermore, half of Germany was living under totalitarian rule until the 1980's. Germany's record on democracy is poor; that's not a "jab", it's a fact. And some aspects of modern Germany are disturbingly like the Weimar Republic.
You don't have to register your party affiliation with anybody in order to vote. Furthermore, if you do register, the registration doesn't constrain who you vote for in the election. Many registered Republicans probably voted for Obama.
The primary system is a system by which political parties select their candidates. It is an alternative to the party-internal processes that are used in many other systems to select candidates. Primaries have their own problems, but they are better than backroom deals.
Given the legal form that German parties have, as well as their tax status, effectively, the German government has at least as much information about German party membership as the US government has about US party membership.
Government registration of residence and workplace can be abused, but generally serves a number of legitimate purpose
Of course it does. That is, until another generation of jack booted thugs hijacks the government, when these records will be used--again--to persecute minorities. The last totalitarian government in Germany ended only 20 years ago. Based on German history, Germans should be highly suspicious of their government, but they keep thinking "this time, we can really trust this government".
It's all about accountability. German government is held accountable for its actions, while Google, as a foreign company, isn't. At least not from a German perspective.
Google is subject to European data protection laws when operating in Germany.
Contrary to what Germans think, the US has strong data protection laws and got them many years before Germany.
I think the difference between the US and Germany is that Americans don't trust their government to follow the law. Germans seem to have a blind trust in their government. Perhaps that's why Germany's history has been so troubled.
nux's tools are the GNU toolset, and the kernel was written from scratch.
Just like, say, Mono.
While many companies would love to claim total ownership of any UNIX-like software that doesn't mean they've got a legal-leg on which to stand.
Yes, just like, say, Microsoft may want to claim total ownership of any.NET-like software, but that doesn't mean that they've go a legal leg to stand on.
All this bullshit about Novell, Microsoft, and Mono is just that: bullshit. Mono is no worse off legally than GNU, Linux, Ghostscript, gcc, and a host of other open source favorites are.
I wonder whether this anti-Mono FUD isn't actually coming from Microsoft because Microsoft really doesn't want Mono to catch on in a big way.
Only everyone actually serious about using open source. Which leaves you in the idiots-on-the-sideline-without-a-clue category. Or astroturfing-assholes-making-shit-up...
I've created a lot more FOSS in my life than you. The "asshole" (to use your own words) here is you and people like you who misuse FOSS issues as a means for venting.
Yeah you've said the same 6 times in this story Speedtux [slashdot.org]
Your point being, Mr. Anonymous?... forgetting...
Other open source supporters have a far worse history: IBM, Sun, Nokia, etc.
Infact listen to this to learn what Microsoft+Novell are doing to Linux [youtube.com] if you need any more convincing that Novell are just like SCO.
Novell clearly isn't "just like SCO". All Novell has done is taken hundreds of millions of dollars from Microsoft and used them to develop more free software.
Are indemnifications and similar agreements a problem for FOSS? You bet. But you're not going to fix that by boycotting Novell. I'd much rather have Novell sell these indemnifications than Microsoft.
Let's say this was a Open Source and Free Software meeting and all they promoted was proprietary software. Would protesting that be fair?
They can protest all they want, just not on other people's property.
Furthermore, how dare your promote free software at an open source event? Don't you understand how evil free software is? I think we should banish all free software-related events from open source meetings!
Remember that Novell
You know, I really don't give a damn. Novell contributes a lot to FOSS, and their deal with Microsoft poses very little real risk. There are companies I'd like to see boycotted; Novell isn't among them.
You're presuming that they are right; I think these people are full of shit.
But whether they are right or not doesn't even matter. I don't want to hear anti-Novell or pro-Novell messages at all at open source conferences, I want people to stick to the agenda and topics that I came for.
By that reasoning, you should boycott anything Linus or the BSD community produce: when those projects started, their kernels and tools were under considerable legal uncertainty. AT&T and other vendors claimed lots of copyrights and patents. You also shouldn't use Java because Sun has numerous patents on Java.
Open source has always been pushing the limits on patents, copyrights, and cloning, and open source has always been rubbing powerful vendors the wrong way. If anything, the legal situation surrounding Mono is better than it was for Linux or Java: with Mono, we have a public commitment from Microsoft that the core is free (the core that FOSS Mono software actually uses), and nobody has been able to identify patents that read on the core language, libraries, or runtime.
The only reason people get pushed out of shape about Mono is because of the Microsoft connection. But let me tell you: the original UNIX overlords were just as nasty and monopolistic and people still adopted Linux and made it a success.
There shouldnt be any freedom of speech limiting withing groups which both support open and free software.
Why not? Open source and free software events have rules and agendas like any other meeting. And participants have limited time to get the job done they came for.
If participants or protestors won't shut up and keep disrupting the event, they should get kicked out by security. It doesn't matter who it is or what message they are pushing, and it doesn't matter whether it's in the US or India.
The objections of BoycottNovell.com against Novell make no sense to me: Microsoft's deal with Novell hasn't affected anybody negatively, and Novell continues to make valuable contributions to the FOSS communities (note: I'm an Ubuntu user, and although I like Mono better than Java, I don't use it much).
At the top of my list of companies that claim to be open source-friendly but that actually have dangerous agendas would be Sun, Apple, and Nokia. All of those companies have big patent portfolios, deals with Microsoft, and patent deals, and they have frequently acted against the interests of open source and open standards, and we still don't boycott them. Furthermore, although those other companies talk a lot about their contributions, Novell is probably responsible for a lot more software that people use day-to-day.
This kind of bullshit would stop if the patent office required working implementations again.
The hard part of most inventions is making them work, not having the original idea. Granting patents on ideas that haven't been implemented harms innovation because it discourages people from investing the money to make inventions work.
Germans accept that the German government tracks and records their entire lives: connection tracking, on-line surveillance, unique identifiers, mandatory carrying of identity cards, government registration of where they live and work, and even registration of their religious affiliation. This data can be mined, exchanged, and used by different government agencies.
It seems quite weird for Germans to get upset about ad tracking. Between Google and the German government, I'd be much more concerned about what the German government might do with that data; their history is, shall we say, less than stellar.
Things like regular expressions are stupidly annoying to use (compare to Perl or Lua+LPeg).
Huh? Perl uses regular expressions extensively, and many other languages have adopted Perl's regular expressions.
I'm sorry you don't "get" regular expressions, but they are probably the biggest success story of text processing ever: powerful, concise, efficient, and theoretically well understood. They are also a fundamental part of computer science.
Remember, if it's more complex for the parser to understand, it's more complex for a human to understand.
What's easy for computers to parse (e.g., deeply nested S-expressions) is often very hard for people to parse. And what's easy for people to understand (like English) still defeats machines. So, please, stop making up facts.
We really shouldn't be surprised by the EU and The Left's fascination with this kind of behaviour. Orwell saw and predicted it nearly 50 years ago.
And The Right is any better? Right wing TV and radio manipulates with the best of them, NewSpeak is enormously popular on The Right, conservative Christianity is a prime example of DoubleThink, The Right has been trying to enact ThoughtCrime legislation, and The Right's support of Israel is, shall we say, rather self-serving.
Has anything private been released? If not, I don't see a problem. Yes, if you make yourself a public figure, you'll get scrutinized, but so what?
If this guy had had outstanding warrants or was behind on his child support, of course, the responsible agencies should find out about it and do something about it. Can you imagine what kind of headlines they'd get otherwise? "Deadbeat Dad on TV--Bureaucrats Asleep".
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I have a couple of iPods. I think the software that runs on them, as well as iTunes itself, is pretty mediocre. But the widespread hardware support and the fact that I could plug them in to a Linux system and they just worked made all of that bearable.
With the iPod Touch and its proprietary hash, Apple has crossed the line. With Apple's own software, the iPod Touch can't even be moved between desktop and laptop, and I don't have any option anymore other than to use Apple's shitty iTunes software. My next video player is going to be something like an Archos 5, and for music, a simple $50 no-name player does just fine.
Software was believed to be unpatentable during the creation of UNIX - so no, GCC and BSD, etc were far better off than Mono, or Linux now.
Nonsense. BSD was under serious legal threats from AT&T.
You choose to assume good intent
I'm not assuming "good intent". Microsoft is one of the sleaziest companies around. They simply can't do anything to Mono.
I'm calling for cautious and skeptical analysis of everything MS does in light of their track record. My fears are justified, your blanket denials of things you can't know are not.
Your fears are not justified. Mono's patent situation is, if anything, considerably better known than most other FOSS. That doesn't mean it's risk free, it means it's no more risky than most other FOSS software.
You are simply spreading FUD, and at this point, one really has to wonder what the motives of people like you are. Do you get paid by Microsoft for spreading FUD about a competing FOSS project? Are you a KDE fanboy?
And while you find it amusing that we accept mandatory registration, I, for example, find it amusing that a U.S. citizen has to register himself in order to be able to carry out his most basic democratic right: voting.
In Germany, you don't need to register to vote because the government already knows so much about you anyway. Furthermore, Germans seem apathetic about it.
Voter registration exists in the US because the government doesn't know who you are, and it only involves the minimum amount of information necessary for the election. And it's an issue that people examine in detail every election.
Not that I like all of it, but some things sound much more scary than they are in practice.
In day to day life, those things indeed don't matter. They start mattering when the government starts abusing its power: politicians blackmailing rival politicians, totalitarian politicians coming to power, etc. By the time those things start mattering to you, it's too late.
Lots of parties, a parliamentary system, coalitions, and massive governmental data collection was what got Germany into trouble in the 1930's. What reason do we have to believe that it will be any better this time?
Germany has ex-communists and ex-Stasi in its parliament, and Nazi sympathizers have significant political influence.
n practice it seems to me like actually that's more privacy than you'd expect in the unregulated USA, where companies routinely sell customer data to the highest bidder
The US is not "unregulated". The US had data protection laws decades before Germany, and both governmental and private uses of data is regulated.
And you're naive if you think that the government and private dealing in personal data isn't going on at least as much in Germany. The difference is that in the US people make a stink about it.
Do you really think your data is more private if you don't have some clear laws about what the government and everyone else can do with it?
I think my data is more private if I don't have to give it out.
As for the last jab at the German government, let's just say that it's record has actually been pretty damn good since 1945. Yes, the Weimar republic had some weaker safeguards and it did fail once. We learned from that mistake and fixed the system.
The Weimar Republic itself was only the outcome of WWI. Democracy after WWII was imposed and managed by the victors, and has never faced any serious economic or political crisis. There were a few previous attempts at democracy, and they also failed. Furthermore, half of Germany was living under totalitarian rule until the 1980's. Germany's record on democracy is poor; that's not a "jab", it's a fact. And some aspects of modern Germany are disturbingly like the Weimar Republic.
You don't have to register your party affiliation with anybody in order to vote. Furthermore, if you do register, the registration doesn't constrain who you vote for in the election. Many registered Republicans probably voted for Obama.
The primary system is a system by which political parties select their candidates. It is an alternative to the party-internal processes that are used in many other systems to select candidates. Primaries have their own problems, but they are better than backroom deals.
Given the legal form that German parties have, as well as their tax status, effectively, the German government has at least as much information about German party membership as the US government has about US party membership.
Government registration of residence and workplace can be abused, but generally serves a number of legitimate purpose
Of course it does. That is, until another generation of jack booted thugs hijacks the government, when these records will be used--again--to persecute minorities. The last totalitarian government in Germany ended only 20 years ago. Based on German history, Germans should be highly suspicious of their government, but they keep thinking "this time, we can really trust this government".
It's all about accountability. German government is held accountable for its actions, while Google, as a foreign company, isn't. At least not from a German perspective.
Google is subject to European data protection laws when operating in Germany.
Contrary to what Germans think, the US has strong data protection laws and got them many years before Germany.
I think the difference between the US and Germany is that Americans don't trust their government to follow the law. Germans seem to have a blind trust in their government. Perhaps that's why Germany's history has been so troubled.
nux's tools are the GNU toolset, and the kernel was written from scratch.
Just like, say, Mono.
While many companies would love to claim total ownership of any UNIX-like software that doesn't mean they've got a legal-leg on which to stand.
Yes, just like, say, Microsoft may want to claim total ownership of any .NET-like software, but that doesn't mean that they've go a legal leg to stand on.
All this bullshit about Novell, Microsoft, and Mono is just that: bullshit. Mono is no worse off legally than GNU, Linux, Ghostscript, gcc, and a host of other open source favorites are.
I wonder whether this anti-Mono FUD isn't actually coming from Microsoft because Microsoft really doesn't want Mono to catch on in a big way.
Only everyone actually serious about using open source. Which leaves you in the idiots-on-the-sideline-without-a-clue category. Or astroturfing-assholes-making-shit-up...
I've created a lot more FOSS in my life than you. The "asshole" (to use your own words) here is you and people like you who misuse FOSS issues as a means for venting.
Yeah you've said the same 6 times in this story Speedtux [slashdot.org]
Your point being, Mr. Anonymous? ... forgetting ...
Other open source supporters have a far worse history: IBM, Sun, Nokia, etc.
Infact listen to this to learn what Microsoft+Novell are doing to Linux [youtube.com] if you need any more convincing that Novell are just like SCO.
Novell clearly isn't "just like SCO". All Novell has done is taken hundreds of millions of dollars from Microsoft and used them to develop more free software.
Are indemnifications and similar agreements a problem for FOSS? You bet. But you're not going to fix that by boycotting Novell. I'd much rather have Novell sell these indemnifications than Microsoft.
Let's say this was a Open Source and Free Software meeting and all they promoted was proprietary software. Would protesting that be fair?
They can protest all they want, just not on other people's property.
Furthermore, how dare your promote free software at an open source event? Don't you understand how evil free software is? I think we should banish all free software-related events from open source meetings!
Remember that Novell
You know, I really don't give a damn. Novell contributes a lot to FOSS, and their deal with Microsoft poses very little real risk. There are companies I'd like to see boycotted; Novell isn't among them.
.Net isn't what new Linux development should use.
Quite right. However, Mono is a good platform for new Linux development.
Meanwhile we've got Python and Ruby applications
Python and Ruby are nice scripting languages, but their C implementations absolutely suck. For example, both lack reasonable threading.
These people warn about this problem.
You're presuming that they are right; I think these people are full of shit.
But whether they are right or not doesn't even matter. I don't want to hear anti-Novell or pro-Novell messages at all at open source conferences, I want people to stick to the agenda and topics that I came for.
By that reasoning, you should boycott anything Linus or the BSD community produce: when those projects started, their kernels and tools were under considerable legal uncertainty. AT&T and other vendors claimed lots of copyrights and patents. You also shouldn't use Java because Sun has numerous patents on Java.
Open source has always been pushing the limits on patents, copyrights, and cloning, and open source has always been rubbing powerful vendors the wrong way. If anything, the legal situation surrounding Mono is better than it was for Linux or Java: with Mono, we have a public commitment from Microsoft that the core is free (the core that FOSS Mono software actually uses), and nobody has been able to identify patents that read on the core language, libraries, or runtime.
The only reason people get pushed out of shape about Mono is because of the Microsoft connection. But let me tell you: the original UNIX overlords were just as nasty and monopolistic and people still adopted Linux and made it a success.
There shouldnt be any freedom of speech limiting withing groups which both support open and free software.
Why not? Open source and free software events have rules and agendas like any other meeting. And participants have limited time to get the job done they came for.
If participants or protestors won't shut up and keep disrupting the event, they should get kicked out by security. It doesn't matter who it is or what message they are pushing, and it doesn't matter whether it's in the US or India.
The objections of BoycottNovell.com against Novell make no sense to me: Microsoft's deal with Novell hasn't affected anybody negatively, and Novell continues to make valuable contributions to the FOSS communities (note: I'm an Ubuntu user, and although I like Mono better than Java, I don't use it much).
At the top of my list of companies that claim to be open source-friendly but that actually have dangerous agendas would be Sun, Apple, and Nokia. All of those companies have big patent portfolios, deals with Microsoft, and patent deals, and they have frequently acted against the interests of open source and open standards, and we still don't boycott them. Furthermore, although those other companies talk a lot about their contributions, Novell is probably responsible for a lot more software that people use day-to-day.
Most of humanity isn't this way. Most of America isn't this way.
This kind of cut-throat need to dominate is pathological and abnormal.
This kind of bullshit would stop if the patent office required working implementations again.
The hard part of most inventions is making them work, not having the original idea. Granting patents on ideas that haven't been implemented harms innovation because it discourages people from investing the money to make inventions work.
Germans accept that the German government tracks and records their entire lives: connection tracking, on-line surveillance, unique identifiers, mandatory carrying of identity cards, government registration of where they live and work, and even registration of their religious affiliation. This data can be mined, exchanged, and used by different government agencies.
It seems quite weird for Germans to get upset about ad tracking. Between Google and the German government, I'd be much more concerned about what the German government might do with that data; their history is, shall we say, less than stellar.
Things like regular expressions are stupidly annoying to use (compare to Perl or Lua+LPeg).
Huh? Perl uses regular expressions extensively, and many other languages have adopted Perl's regular expressions.
I'm sorry you don't "get" regular expressions, but they are probably the biggest success story of text processing ever: powerful, concise, efficient, and theoretically well understood. They are also a fundamental part of computer science.
So keep refactoring your code, and think that your code would already be running if you had GOTO.
Sure, it would be running, but it's easy to get code to run. It's hard to write code that can be maintained.
If you need to do that, there's probably something wrong with your program logic.
And, in any case, named loops (as in Perl) are a better choice if you really need this kind of functionality.
Remember, if it's more complex for the parser to understand, it's more complex for a human to understand.
What's easy for computers to parse (e.g., deeply nested S-expressions) is often very hard for people to parse. And what's easy for people to understand (like English) still defeats machines. So, please, stop making up facts.
We really shouldn't be surprised by the EU and The Left's fascination with this kind of behaviour. Orwell saw and predicted it nearly 50 years ago.
And The Right is any better? Right wing TV and radio manipulates with the best of them, NewSpeak is enormously popular on The Right, conservative Christianity is a prime example of DoubleThink, The Right has been trying to enact ThoughtCrime legislation, and The Right's support of Israel is, shall we say, rather self-serving.
Has anything private been released? If not, I don't see a problem. Yes, if you make yourself a public figure, you'll get scrutinized, but so what?
If this guy had had outstanding warrants or was behind on his child support, of course, the responsible agencies should find out about it and do something about it. Can you imagine what kind of headlines they'd get otherwise? "Deadbeat Dad on TV--Bureaucrats Asleep".
We have this thing called the Data Protection Act, which the US does not have.
In fact, not only does the US have data privacy laws, it has had them since the 1970's. It took the UK nearly a quarter of a century to catch up.