Actually, while netscape 4.x is a really PITA and a waste of time by abstract (read: impractical) standards, there are some tricks for it. For example, tables can replace divs most of the time. Also, since netscape 4.x doesn't support (I think that it's) @import in a style sheet, but all good browsers do, you can put the main part of your style sheet in the @import'd style sheet, and put the 4.x friendly stuff in the main style sheet. Not perfect, but from what I understand it gets the job done to a large degree.
We got tons of mail from people saying that they can't (usefully) get at our website. However, when we look at our logs, we see almost noone on these platforms viewing our website, so they're statistically insignificant.
Has it really not occurred to you that if you require IE, you're not going to get many page requests from netscape?
On a similar note, it's really amusing how crappy the overwhelming majority of sites that require IE are. Generaly stupid, ugly, slow, and often prone to problems.
And it's the bit bucket, not the bin bucket.
Of course, most major web designers seem to be unimaginably stupid, so I can't say that what you're saying is a surprise. Still, you might want to try thinking a bit. At least theoretically it does help to make money, if nothing else.
If you think that sawfish is bloated, your just plain stupid. Sawfish is relatively minimalistic, and can be made to be extremely minimalistic if you're so inclined.
As for gnome 1.4, maybe something is horribly wrong on whatever compiler was used for your package, but I run it daily and I don't have constant CPU usuage. I've never seen anyone who did have constant CPU usuage from it. Well, ther eis the fact that you're running nautilus, but it begs the question: why? I don't think that anyone has represented nautilus as being close to ready for real use. And what were you using it for? there are plenty of graphical file managers, including gmc - the gnome standard one.
And if you find the gnome interface difficult to navigate, then either you're completely braindead or are just so used to some particular interface that you think that anything that isn't that interface is hard.
I'm sorry that I'm in a bad mood and as a result my comments are sounding harsher than I mean them to, but basically your post is either a fairly well devised troll or a bunch of stupid drivel. In the off chance that it's the later (this being/. does give about a 60/40 chance that any given post is a troll), try doing a little exploration and thinking. And remember that if a tool requires you to learn a little bit about it in order to use it effectively, it isn't the end of the world.
If you think that office has a good user interface, you're on crack. I haven't noticed it making the easy stuff particularly easy (aside from what's on the toolbar, of course, but everyone has had a toolbar with roughly similar buttons for a long time). Nor does microsoft office make the hard stuff particularly doable. For example, writing even slightly complicated excel macros is a nightmare of poor documentation, a shitty development environment, and error messages that are barely worth anything.
And what genius came up with the magic disappearing menus? I guess that there are a few people who are very new to office who this helps by reducing confusion, but it doesn't make finding menu items any easier when you have to go click on a button to see them.
Then there is the way that office constantly guesses at what you're doing and then occasionally makes (apparently) non-reversible changes to your document because you're making a bulleted list, or something like that.
Yes, you can turn off most of the bad options, and you can kill the damn paperclip. The point still stands that you don't have a good UI if users have to disable large portions of its "features" before they can stand it.
And I've never actually met anyone who has used both MS office and some other office software who didn't dislike office, even years after they've gotten used to it and switched to it (because of corporate decisions).
The really sad part about all this is that microsoft actually does testing to come up with their user interface. It sometimes makes me wonder just how big a segment of their market they think that people on drugs actually are!
Actually, the really typical part is that this guy uses himself as an example of the general public. Because he uses photoshop all the time, everyone does. Wonderful logic, isn't it? Sample sizes of 1 are perfectly valid, of course.
Why does it never occur to these trolls that the majority of people who use computers don't do very much on them, and don't really want all that much from them? Most people have jobs that aren't computer-centered and might only involve computers very tangentially.
But because this guy uses photoshop, everyone does.
Personally, I think that the icing on the cake is that the first flaw that he can think of is cutting and pasting images. Personally, btw, I can't even see the utility of cutting and pasting images - I personally always use a tree-based database to store my images and then put them into documents using object linking. That is, I leave my files on the file-system and then put them in documents using the file name. It works well and is quite efficient for me (saves on disk space, too).
It really is amazing how far human laziness will go, though. In generally people will take ease over everything. If you can convince people that something is easy, they'll take it over freedom, flexibility, and power.
Oh well. you'll never be able to change people like this. They're going to be lazy, no matter how much effort it costs them in the long run.
However, photoshop isn't the best example of this - it's a reasonably open program that allows one a lot of control through plugins. The really funny people are the ones who use website editors but aren't people who are only making their personal homepage or some other little website.
You know, I don't think that I've ever seen a good website that was made with a fancy website editor - it just seems like there's something about doing html in a wysiwyg way that makes developers stupid. Maybe it's because html isn't wysiwyg?
What he posted wasn't even remotely brave. Slashdot is not a pro-linux environment and hasn't been for a long time. Every MS/Linux article now has hords of posts like this, i.e. hords of posts talking about how MS products have upsides and linux products have downsides, and linux isn't for everyone (often mixed in with some idiotic thing about linux users looking down their noses at beginners).
I don't know what/. you're reading, but his post is really very redundant. Not to mention silly - if it installed fine, you generally need to learn how to do things like using the gimp - as if learning to use photoshop is substantially easier. Using netscape doesn't change from windows, and none of your standard word processing software is difficult to use (I expect that he's not using TeX).
But oh well. It's hip to bash linux here on/., and then to claim that it's actually dangerous to do so, or at least any more dangerous than to post anything here. Please stop with the calling pro-MSers brave. They might have been on/. three years ago - not now.
Actually, there are some very good arguments for banning the internet in schools, but they don't have to do with moral arguments. It's simply that there are enough factors which inhibit that actual transmission of information in schools, the internet will just make it even more difficult.
I mean, really, have you ever seen what happens when technology becomes the focus of actual education? People learn skills that become osbscolete extremely quickly and don't really learn other things.
Take, as an example, the "current events projects" which are done every now and then in a "global studies" (i.e. history) class. What is the basic idea? Students get together a whole bunch of nearly irrelevent information that noone cares about, and then forget it. At least when they learn history and forget it there is the chance that they will actually remember some of the important bits.
The internet in schools, where it is not simply ignored, would serve a fairly similar purpose. People would do nearly anything but get actual real information which pertains to the basic subjects that they should actually be learning.
Of course, it would be fine to have some internet-enabled computers in a school available after school hours for students to use for research, email, etc.
Btw, as someone else said, imagine if the irreligious left got into power? It would be just as bad as you describe, but with different goals and a different slant.
Extremists are an interesting group. By and large they tend to be dangerous, but on the other hand, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
As I said. Extremists are an odd group to know what to do with.
Actually, the point of an SUV, at least for many people, is that on-road conditions often turn into off-road conditions. SUVs, with 4-wheel drive, handle much better on snow and ice than do 2-wheel drive sub-compact cars. I know, I've drived both and nearly died in the sub-compact many times as I've had to fight for control in conditions that the SUV didn't flinch in.
Oh, and my honda CRV gets between 25 and 30 mpg, which is better than some compact cars that I know. It's just a matter of which SUV you have. They're not all bad by any means, and they can be quite useful. Not to mention actually having cargo space comes in handy an awful lot.
I just wantted to say that you've put it quite well and stated what I think many people believe.
Keep up the good work!
Re:Kubrick films not meant to be entertainment
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 1
That's quite, quite true. Having seen many of kubric's films, the only two that have anything intertaining in them is Dr Strangelove and Clockwork orange. Lolita does have a "wacky cot scene" in it, but that's about the closest that it gets to entertainment.
Of course, kubric never actually raised an interesting issue in any of his movies, so I'm inclined to regard them mostly as a waste of time. (If I want to contemplate the beauty of the universe set to Wagner, I'll get a CD of wagner's music and go to the beach and contemplate the eternal pounding of the waves, or something like that).
But I do agree with you, kubric spent quite a lot of time making movies that don't entertain at all.
Actually, it should be perfectly legal to listen to other people's conversations should be perfectly legal. If they didn't want their portable phone conversations listened to, they should take steps to keep the EMR that the phone uses from spreading out of their property.
There's an old saying that goes something like, "when people shout, it's hard not to listen". It's patently unreasonable to put something of yours in someone else's house and then expect them to not take it. As someone else said, if someone doesn't want me to listen to the EMR coming into my house, they can not send it there.
If I come barging into your house and then carry on a conversation with my friend, are you morally obligated to not listen?
Haven't you ever heard of the rule of 3 for microsoft? Every version of microsoft software before version 3 (and sometimes including it) is a useless piece of shit that noone uses.
But that never stops microsoft. They just keep putting money and time into it until they've got a workable enough product, and enough of their other products depend on it, then they win.
But of course, persistance is a losing strategy. If you're not #1 you should just give up. What a brilliant strategy.
The GPL doesn't force anyone to give anything away for free. If you honestly believe this, and you've actually *read* the GPL, than you're just stupid.
I'm going to assume that you're not stupid and just haven't read the GPL. So, the abridged version:
You can charge whatever you want for distributing a GPL'd program, you just can't restrict those people from redistributing it (under the GPL).
Moreover, you can charge someone whatever you want to write a GPL'd program.
Also, a tip about how the world works: programmers don't, in general, get paid for re-inventing the wheel over and over again. Once one programmer invents the wheel, he writes it in library form for others to use, and they then have to do things like put wheels together to make mobile vehicles.
So the fact that software that does a particular task exists for free isn't relevant. If the software exists, it will probably be used in preference to custom-written software anyhow.
Custom-written software is for when something doesn't exist quite the way that someone wants it to. Then they find a programmer and pay them to make it work the way that they want it to.
The fact that afterwards they might release it for free doesn't change anything.
This basically all hinges on the fact that there are an almost infinite number of problems available for humans to try to solve. Once they solve some problems, it's just made other problems accessable now. Once those problems are solved, more have become accessable, and so on into infinity.
Programmers get paid because people want these new problems solved. Once the world runs out of new problems to solve, programmers will be out of work and no amount of proprietary licensing is going to change this.
"Regardless, id software and Valve are both in the same boat: by using an open standard to render their games, they are relying on security through obscurity."
Do you honestly mean to say that Asus could only write openGL drivers that do this? It would be impossible for them to write Direct3D drivers which did roughly the same thing? It would be impossible for them to write the drivers for their card for any other 3D library to render there scenes?
There are sometimes in the course of human events institutions which must be destoryed, institutions whose very existence is an impediment to better things.
Microsoft is out to take over the world. They want to own the information architecture to the world, and they have repeatedly demonstrated that they will use almost any tactics necessary to do so (to my knowledge they haven't had anyone killed yet).
Microsoft is out to conquer the world and control it. Microsoft must be destroyed so that this is not possible. Every time that microsoft gets hurt, it is theoretically one step closer to being destroyed.
This is what you percieve as hate - many people want to live free lives where they are not controlled in most details of their life by some one person.
This is all very simple and has been said over and over. The fact that you don't understand it seems to be strong evidence that you're just a troll.
Consider the evidence:
1. Microsoft wants their products to be everywhere
2. Microsoft has demonstrated that they will compete using all legal techniques, not just on merit (vendor lock-in and monopoly pressure being their two favorites)
3. The world is moving more and more towards being information centered. Look at the various "intelligent" devices which are being created and more are being slated. Look at music that will require special devices to play, etc. Just think of when cars are networked and require a valid windows license (revokable at microsoft's whim) to operate.
Microsoft is bad for the world. In general most free people want a democracy or something equivalent, they don't want the world controlled by bill gates.
You've made the classic mistake of confusing a vocal minority with an important majority or even an important minority.
No sane person debunks benchmarks and then considers them seriously meaningful, and most linux users are sane. Remember that Taco & crew are editors trying to push page-hits up, they're not a real part of the linux community. Just look at how much Taco runs linux for to see that.
The Slashdot editors stopped being a real part of the linux community a long time ago, mostly when they turned commercial. They have some pro-linux sentments largely because, I suspect, the crowd that would be pleased by this is a decent portion of the slashdot viewership.
As well, people who like to yell and scream whenever they see linux partisanship start generating more page counts when Taco & crew starts getting into the irrational linux-mentioning stories.
As Hanlon's razor goes: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Just substitute greed (or more charitably desperation) for stupidity, and the current situation has a very good explanation.
If you doubt this, just take a look at the percentage of the/. readership which is posting in favor of taking these benchmarks seriously.
It's always dangerous to judge the majority by a vocal minority, and especially so on/.
"Only time you notice a carpet is when it's filthy. When its syntax is filled with !@$% symbols. When it has memory leaks. Etc."
Wow, you don't know much about rugs, do you? You also notice rugs when they're especially pretty, or contain interesting patterns, or tell great stories succinctly, such as s|\W|sprintf("%%%x", ord($1))|ge.
Btw, are you really implying that noone who programs with python actually notices the language? That they just subconsciously add in the name of the interpreter in the #! line at the top of the program, without it ever occuring to them that when they type "#!/usr/bin/env python" they don't actually realize that that means that the python interpreter is going to run. That you never have to look up a function? That you never make syntax errors?
You forgot that various anti slashdot trolls almost invariably get marked up.
And where does this legend about pro-microsoft people getting modded down come from? Far, far too many of the highly modded posts are just (well written) pro-microsoft trolls.
And let's not forget the whole group who always say, "this post will be modded down" so that they don't get modded down.
Of course, posts like this one, which point out that, do get modded down.
It almost is enough to make one think that there really is a conspiracy among the trolls.
Of course, the editors around here don't help, with their near-constant falling into trolling themselves (their remarks usually seemed to be designed to elicit comments from people such as you remarking on the/. bias).
Slashdot is going to hell, but it isn't the/. users, it's the editors. They're the ones who all have opinions of nearly complete selfishness and try to push this assanine "point of view" on everyone else. Who knows. Maybe they go around with unlimited moderator points and mod up anything that would start a flame war in an attempt to get banner views. I'd almost go so far as to suspect them of posting the various trolls, except that most of the trolls are written in english far better than what Comander "I never use windows except for all of my games" Taco.
If we had a real set of editors, rather than the arrested-in-tenth-grade guys we have now, slashdot might be what it once was.
Do you not believe in prisons, or in the world having fought hitler? If a man gets on a train with a gun and starts shooting people (it's happened), is it really wrong for people to stop him?
I'm just curious how consistent you are with this.
Wow. You're really packing in the irrelevancies, aren't you?
What does her having been raped have to do with complications in the pregnancy?
Most people who are against abortion are usually willing to allow the baby to be killed if it really comes down to a choice between one of the two of them dying anyhow.
That point aside, why is someone's morality invalid because they got it from a religion rather than some other source? They think that killing a fetus is murder. You think that killing a man is murder. Why is your morality valid and theirs isn't? In both cases, noone is talking about an act which affects only the person performing it, so "everyone to their own" can't apply. Why then is it wrong for people to think that something is murder because of their religion but not wrong because they inherited the idea from their parents?
Many of the people on this website would probably consider public disclosure of how to find these doctors for "reproductive services" to be advocating murder, and abetting it.
It's just good to remember that there is often more than one side to an issue.
They're selling bandwidth and the way that they organized the code, not the code itself. You can get that for free elsewhere. This is quite a standard distribution model and quite within the Right Way to make money in a Free Software world. They're nothing underhanded or wrong in this approach.
It had some applicability back when, but nowadays X has a tendency to just work on most computers without really requiring any fidling at all. And for every anecdote about someone's X setup not working on linux out of the box, I'll give you one about it not working on windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, while netscape 4.x is a really PITA and a waste of time by abstract (read: impractical) standards, there are some tricks for it. For example, tables can replace divs most of the time. Also, since netscape 4.x doesn't support (I think that it's) @import in a style sheet, but all good browsers do, you can put the main part of your style sheet in the @import'd style sheet, and put the 4.x friendly stuff in the main style sheet. Not perfect, but from what I understand it gets the job done to a large degree.
We got tons of mail from people saying that they can't (usefully) get at our website. However, when we look at our logs, we see almost noone on these platforms viewing our website, so they're statistically insignificant.
Has it really not occurred to you that if you require IE, you're not going to get many page requests from netscape?
On a similar note, it's really amusing how crappy the overwhelming majority of sites that require IE are. Generaly stupid, ugly, slow, and often prone to problems.
And it's the bit bucket, not the bin bucket.
Of course, most major web designers seem to be unimaginably stupid, so I can't say that what you're saying is a surprise. Still, you might want to try thinking a bit. At least theoretically it does help to make money, if nothing else.
If you think that sawfish is bloated, your just plain stupid. Sawfish is relatively minimalistic, and can be made to be extremely minimalistic if you're so inclined.
/. does give about a 60/40 chance that any given post is a troll), try doing a little exploration and thinking. And remember that if a tool requires you to learn a little bit about it in order to use it effectively, it isn't the end of the world.
As for gnome 1.4, maybe something is horribly wrong on whatever compiler was used for your package, but I run it daily and I don't have constant CPU usuage. I've never seen anyone who did have constant CPU usuage from it. Well, ther eis the fact that you're running nautilus, but it begs the question: why? I don't think that anyone has represented nautilus as being close to ready for real use. And what were you using it for? there are plenty of graphical file managers, including gmc - the gnome standard one.
And if you find the gnome interface difficult to navigate, then either you're completely braindead or are just so used to some particular interface that you think that anything that isn't that interface is hard.
I'm sorry that I'm in a bad mood and as a result my comments are sounding harsher than I mean them to, but basically your post is either a fairly well devised troll or a bunch of stupid drivel. In the off chance that it's the later (this being
If you think that office has a good user interface, you're on crack. I haven't noticed it making the easy stuff particularly easy (aside from what's on the toolbar, of course, but everyone has had a toolbar with roughly similar buttons for a long time). Nor does microsoft office make the hard stuff particularly doable. For example, writing even slightly complicated excel macros is a nightmare of poor documentation, a shitty development environment, and error messages that are barely worth anything.
And what genius came up with the magic disappearing menus? I guess that there are a few people who are very new to office who this helps by reducing confusion, but it doesn't make finding menu items any easier when you have to go click on a button to see them.
Then there is the way that office constantly guesses at what you're doing and then occasionally makes (apparently) non-reversible changes to your document because you're making a bulleted list, or something like that.
Yes, you can turn off most of the bad options, and you can kill the damn paperclip. The point still stands that you don't have a good UI if users have to disable large portions of its "features" before they can stand it.
And I've never actually met anyone who has used both MS office and some other office software who didn't dislike office, even years after they've gotten used to it and switched to it (because of corporate decisions).
The really sad part about all this is that microsoft actually does testing to come up with their user interface. It sometimes makes me wonder just how big a segment of their market they think that people on drugs actually are!
Actually, the really typical part is that this guy uses himself as an example of the general public. Because he uses photoshop all the time, everyone does. Wonderful logic, isn't it? Sample sizes of 1 are perfectly valid, of course.
Why does it never occur to these trolls that the majority of people who use computers don't do very much on them, and don't really want all that much from them? Most people have jobs that aren't computer-centered and might only involve computers very tangentially.
But because this guy uses photoshop, everyone does.
Personally, I think that the icing on the cake is that the first flaw that he can think of is cutting and pasting images. Personally, btw, I can't even see the utility of cutting and pasting images - I personally always use a tree-based database to store my images and then put them into documents using object linking. That is, I leave my files on the file-system and then put them in documents using the file name. It works well and is quite efficient for me (saves on disk space, too).
It really is amazing how far human laziness will go, though. In generally people will take ease over everything. If you can convince people that something is easy, they'll take it over freedom, flexibility, and power.
Oh well. you'll never be able to change people like this. They're going to be lazy, no matter how much effort it costs them in the long run.
However, photoshop isn't the best example of this - it's a reasonably open program that allows one a lot of control through plugins. The really funny people are the ones who use website editors but aren't people who are only making their personal homepage or some other little website.
You know, I don't think that I've ever seen a good website that was made with a fancy website editor - it just seems like there's something about doing html in a wysiwyg way that makes developers stupid. Maybe it's because html isn't wysiwyg?
What he posted wasn't even remotely brave. Slashdot is not a pro-linux environment and hasn't been for a long time. Every MS/Linux article now has hords of posts like this, i.e. hords of posts talking about how MS products have upsides and linux products have downsides, and linux isn't for everyone (often mixed in with some idiotic thing about linux users looking down their noses at beginners).
/. you're reading, but his post is really very redundant. Not to mention silly - if it installed fine, you generally need to learn how to do things like using the gimp - as if learning to use photoshop is substantially easier. Using netscape doesn't change from windows, and none of your standard word processing software is difficult to use (I expect that he's not using TeX).
/., and then to claim that it's actually dangerous to do so, or at least any more dangerous than to post anything here. Please stop with the calling pro-MSers brave. They might have been on /. three years ago - not now.
I don't know what
But oh well. It's hip to bash linux here on
Actually, there are some very good arguments for banning the internet in schools, but they don't have to do with moral arguments. It's simply that there are enough factors which inhibit that actual transmission of information in schools, the internet will just make it even more difficult.
I mean, really, have you ever seen what happens when technology becomes the focus of actual education? People learn skills that become osbscolete extremely quickly and don't really learn other things.
Take, as an example, the "current events projects" which are done every now and then in a "global studies" (i.e. history) class. What is the basic idea? Students get together a whole bunch of nearly irrelevent information that noone cares about, and then forget it. At least when they learn history and forget it there is the chance that they will actually remember some of the important bits.
The internet in schools, where it is not simply ignored, would serve a fairly similar purpose. People would do nearly anything but get actual real information which pertains to the basic subjects that they should actually be learning.
Of course, it would be fine to have some internet-enabled computers in a school available after school hours for students to use for research, email, etc.
Btw, as someone else said, imagine if the irreligious left got into power? It would be just as bad as you describe, but with different goals and a different slant.
Extremists are an interesting group. By and large they tend to be dangerous, but on the other hand, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
As I said. Extremists are an odd group to know what to do with.
Actually, the point of an SUV, at least for many people, is that on-road conditions often turn into off-road conditions. SUVs, with 4-wheel drive, handle much better on snow and ice than do 2-wheel drive sub-compact cars. I know, I've drived both and nearly died in the sub-compact many times as I've had to fight for control in conditions that the SUV didn't flinch in.
Oh, and my honda CRV gets between 25 and 30 mpg, which is better than some compact cars that I know. It's just a matter of which SUV you have. They're not all bad by any means, and they can be quite useful. Not to mention actually having cargo space comes in handy an awful lot.
I just wantted to say that you've put it quite well and stated what I think many people believe.
Keep up the good work!
That's quite, quite true. Having seen many of kubric's films, the only two that have anything intertaining in them is Dr Strangelove and Clockwork orange. Lolita does have a "wacky cot scene" in it, but that's about the closest that it gets to entertainment.
Of course, kubric never actually raised an interesting issue in any of his movies, so I'm inclined to regard them mostly as a waste of time. (If I want to contemplate the beauty of the universe set to Wagner, I'll get a CD of wagner's music and go to the beach and contemplate the eternal pounding of the waves, or something like that).
But I do agree with you, kubric spent quite a lot of time making movies that don't entertain at all.
Actually, it should be perfectly legal to listen to other people's conversations should be perfectly legal. If they didn't want their portable phone conversations listened to, they should take steps to keep the EMR that the phone uses from spreading out of their property.
There's an old saying that goes something like, "when people shout, it's hard not to listen". It's patently unreasonable to put something of yours in someone else's house and then expect them to not take it. As someone else said, if someone doesn't want me to listen to the EMR coming into my house, they can not send it there.
If I come barging into your house and then carry on a conversation with my friend, are you morally obligated to not listen?
And how do you enable it?
Haven't you ever heard of the rule of 3 for microsoft? Every version of microsoft software before version 3 (and sometimes including it) is a useless piece of shit that noone uses.
But that never stops microsoft. They just keep putting money and time into it until they've got a workable enough product, and enough of their other products depend on it, then they win.
But of course, persistance is a losing strategy. If you're not #1 you should just give up. What a brilliant strategy.
Doesn't anyone study history any more?
The GPL doesn't force anyone to give anything away for free. If you honestly believe this, and you've actually *read* the GPL, than you're just stupid.
I'm going to assume that you're not stupid and just haven't read the GPL. So, the abridged version:
You can charge whatever you want for distributing a GPL'd program, you just can't restrict those people from redistributing it (under the GPL).
Moreover, you can charge someone whatever you want to write a GPL'd program.
Also, a tip about how the world works: programmers don't, in general, get paid for re-inventing the wheel over and over again. Once one programmer invents the wheel, he writes it in library form for others to use, and they then have to do things like put wheels together to make mobile vehicles.
So the fact that software that does a particular task exists for free isn't relevant. If the software exists, it will probably be used in preference to custom-written software anyhow.
Custom-written software is for when something doesn't exist quite the way that someone wants it to. Then they find a programmer and pay them to make it work the way that they want it to.
The fact that afterwards they might release it for free doesn't change anything.
This basically all hinges on the fact that there are an almost infinite number of problems available for humans to try to solve. Once they solve some problems, it's just made other problems accessable now. Once those problems are solved, more have become accessable, and so on into infinity.
Programmers get paid because people want these new problems solved. Once the world runs out of new problems to solve, programmers will be out of work and no amount of proprietary licensing is going to change this.
"Regardless, id software and Valve are both in the same boat: by using an open standard to render their games, they are relying on security through obscurity."
Do you honestly mean to say that Asus could only write openGL drivers that do this? It would be impossible for them to write Direct3D drivers which did roughly the same thing? It would be impossible for them to write the drivers for their card for any other 3D library to render there scenes?
There are sometimes in the course of human events institutions which must be destoryed, institutions whose very existence is an impediment to better things.
Microsoft is out to take over the world. They want to own the information architecture to the world, and they have repeatedly demonstrated that they will use almost any tactics necessary to do so (to my knowledge they haven't had anyone killed yet).
Microsoft is out to conquer the world and control it. Microsoft must be destroyed so that this is not possible. Every time that microsoft gets hurt, it is theoretically one step closer to being destroyed.
This is what you percieve as hate - many people want to live free lives where they are not controlled in most details of their life by some one person.
This is all very simple and has been said over and over. The fact that you don't understand it seems to be strong evidence that you're just a troll.
Consider the evidence:
1. Microsoft wants their products to be everywhere
2. Microsoft has demonstrated that they will compete using all legal techniques, not just on merit (vendor lock-in and monopoly pressure being their two favorites)
3. The world is moving more and more towards being information centered. Look at the various "intelligent" devices which are being created and more are being slated. Look at music that will require special devices to play, etc. Just think of when cars are networked and require a valid windows license (revokable at microsoft's whim) to operate.
Microsoft is bad for the world. In general most free people want a democracy or something equivalent, they don't want the world controlled by bill gates.
Which part of this do you not understand?
You've made the classic mistake of confusing a vocal minority with an important majority or even an important minority.
/. readership which is posting in favor of taking these benchmarks seriously.
/.
No sane person debunks benchmarks and then considers them seriously meaningful, and most linux users are sane. Remember that Taco & crew are editors trying to push page-hits up, they're not a real part of the linux community. Just look at how much Taco runs linux for to see that.
The Slashdot editors stopped being a real part of the linux community a long time ago, mostly when they turned commercial. They have some pro-linux sentments largely because, I suspect, the crowd that would be pleased by this is a decent portion of the slashdot viewership.
As well, people who like to yell and scream whenever they see linux partisanship start generating more page counts when Taco & crew starts getting into the irrational linux-mentioning stories.
As Hanlon's razor goes: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Just substitute greed (or more charitably desperation) for stupidity, and the current situation has a very good explanation.
If you doubt this, just take a look at the percentage of the
It's always dangerous to judge the majority by a vocal minority, and especially so on
"Only time you notice a carpet is when it's filthy. When its syntax is filled with !@$% symbols. When it has memory leaks. Etc."
/usr/bin/env python" they don't actually realize that that means that the python interpreter is going to run. That you never have to look up a function? That you never make syntax errors?
Wow, you don't know much about rugs, do you? You also notice rugs when they're especially pretty, or contain interesting patterns, or tell great stories succinctly, such as s|\W|sprintf("%%%x", ord($1))|ge.
Btw, are you really implying that noone who programs with python actually notices the language? That they just subconsciously add in the name of the interpreter in the #! line at the top of the program, without it ever occuring to them that when they type "#!
You forgot that various anti slashdot trolls almost invariably get marked up.
/. bias).
/. users, it's the editors. They're the ones who all have opinions of nearly complete selfishness and try to push this assanine "point of view" on everyone else. Who knows. Maybe they go around with unlimited moderator points and mod up anything that would start a flame war in an attempt to get banner views. I'd almost go so far as to suspect them of posting the various trolls, except that most of the trolls are written in english far better than what Comander "I never use windows except for all of my games" Taco.
And where does this legend about pro-microsoft people getting modded down come from? Far, far too many of the highly modded posts are just (well written) pro-microsoft trolls.
And let's not forget the whole group who always say, "this post will be modded down" so that they don't get modded down.
Of course, posts like this one, which point out that, do get modded down.
It almost is enough to make one think that there really is a conspiracy among the trolls.
Of course, the editors around here don't help, with their near-constant falling into trolling themselves (their remarks usually seemed to be designed to elicit comments from people such as you remarking on the
Slashdot is going to hell, but it isn't the
If we had a real set of editors, rather than the arrested-in-tenth-grade guys we have now, slashdot might be what it once was.
Do you not believe in prisons, or in the world having fought hitler? If a man gets on a train with a gun and starts shooting people (it's happened), is it really wrong for people to stop him?
I'm just curious how consistent you are with this.
Wow. You're really packing in the irrelevancies, aren't you?
What does her having been raped have to do with complications in the pregnancy?
Most people who are against abortion are usually willing to allow the baby to be killed if it really comes down to a choice between one of the two of them dying anyhow.
That point aside, why is someone's morality invalid because they got it from a religion rather than some other source? They think that killing a fetus is murder. You think that killing a man is murder. Why is your morality valid and theirs isn't? In both cases, noone is talking about an act which affects only the person performing it, so "everyone to their own" can't apply. Why then is it wrong for people to think that something is murder because of their religion but not wrong because they inherited the idea from their parents?
Many of the people on this website would probably consider public disclosure of how to find these doctors for "reproductive services" to be advocating murder, and abetting it.
It's just good to remember that there is often more than one side to an issue.
They're selling bandwidth and the way that they organized the code, not the code itself. You can get that for free elsewhere. This is quite a standard distribution model and quite within the Right Way to make money in a Free Software world. They're nothing underhanded or wrong in this approach.
It had some applicability back when, but nowadays X has a tendency to just work on most computers without really requiring any fidling at all. And for every anecdote about someone's X setup not working on linux out of the box, I'll give you one about it not working on windows.
"It's unnecessary complexity which is evil."
So you never use contractions or pronouns?