Of course, this wasn't advanced as a serious kernel config option to begin with, and
if the open source world has to change its nature to win, is winning really desirable?
If a CTO wants "professional" Linux, they can pay RedHat or some other services company for it, and good luck to them. But that's no reason that the rest of us can't enjoy it the way we have been all along.
Me, I'm happy to live in a world where I can configure and use Linux in business during the day, and laugh about ESR's antics after work. The guy's an inspiration and a good indication of the level of energy and inventiveness going into the platform. If that spirit of playful curiosity remains, it won't take long to defeat however many billions of dollars worth of business ambition, consumer disregard, FUD, and greed.
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Maybe if you would just bring it a shrubbery? A nice one, not too big...
Courtesy of xscreensaver/hacks/screenhack.h, and reprinted 'cause it's so damn funny and this is a worthy article:
Found in Don Hopkins'.plan file:
The color situation is a total flying circus. The X approach to device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVax framebuffer on acid. A truely portable X application is required to act like the persistent customer in the Monty Python ``Cheese Shop'' sketch. Even the simplest applications must answer many difficult questions, like:
WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY? display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
WHAT IS YOUR ROOT? root = RootWindow(display, DefaultScreen(display));
AND WHAT IS YOUR WINDOW? win = XCreateSimpleWindow(display, root, 0, 0, 256, 256, 1,BlackPixel(display, DefaultScreen(display)),WhitePixel(display, DefaultScreen(display)))
OH ALL RIGHT, YOU CAN GO ON.
WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY? display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
WHAT IS YOUR COLORMAP? cmap = DefaultColormap(display, DefaultScreen(display));
AND WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COLOR? favorite_color = 0; / * Black. * / / * Whoops! No, I mean: * / favorite_color = BlackPixel(display, DefaultScreen(display));
/ * AAAYYYYEEEEE!! (client dumps core & falls into the chasm) * /
WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY?display = XOpenDisplay("unix:0");
WHAT IS YOUR VISUAL? struct XVisualInfo vinfo; if (XMatchVisualInfo(display, DefaultScreen(display), 8, PseudoColor, &vinfo) != 0) visual = vinfo.visual;
AND WHAT IS THE NET SPEED VELOCITY OF AN XConfigureWindow REQUEST? / * Is that a SubStructureRedirectMask or a ResizeRedirectMask? * /
WHAT?! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?
AAAAUUUGGGHHH!!!! (server dumps core & falls into the chasm)
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That makes plenty of sense. The only problem is if you don't actually own the software - if your University has some rule about how they own everything you submit to them, then you can't really relicense anything under the GPL since you're not the copyright holder. That's going to be the big stumbling block for most students.
IANAL either.
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1.6 is based on an integral type (gnc_numeric). This is one of the big changes since 1.4. I'm not sure if a round-off error was ever demonstrated to have occurred with the old code, though.
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How is that any different from current U.S. dollars? They're printed by the government, they're not tied to gold, and you use them because the government says to. The only difference seems to be that Continentals were supposedly tied to gold even though they weren't, whereas currently dollars aren't even remotely tied to gold. They seem a lot more similar than they are different to me at least.
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Just because the dollar has been a fairly stable fiat doesn't make it any less of a fiat. True, commodities have no unique value, because the value will change with supply and demand (although central banks change the value of fiat money as well). Commodities do have inherent value, though, which is equal to what you can get for them on the market. Fiat money has a face value which is different from the open market value of the commodity that the fiat currency supposedly represents.
I'm not necessarily in favor of returning to a gold standard, but let's be clear on terms here: the U.S. dollar is established by fiat of the government, it is not based on anything real anymore, and its stability rests on the money management ability of the U.S. government, not on any real-world estimation of value.
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As long as posts such as yours are visible, I hardly think/. is a PR mouthpiece. Heck, the easiest way to get moderated up around here is to point out problems with Linux, why Microsoft isn't so bad, why the GPL is wrong, etc., etc. And as I discovered the other day just stating your personal reasons to use Linux as opposed to Microsoft software is a good way to get moderated down as a troll. Maybe the front-page news items betray a smidgin of bias from time to time (although I think the editors have made it clear that they do prefer Linux and aren't ashamed to talk it up), but come on - who reads just the front page. As has always been the case on this forum, whenever there's BS on the front page, the highest-rated comment is someone being called on it. I don't see that changing any time soon.
In light of the Register article about Microsoft doctoring the WSJ article and then restoring it, maybe you should reexamine your perceptions of who has more integrity?
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I had all of those stories combined into one volume, The Mad Scientists Club. They were all great, my favorite was probably "The Secret of the Old Cannon", although I couldn't tell you why.
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But if you're really using Laura Croft for the same purposes of titillation (hee hee), doesn't it all come down to the same thing? She's as much a sex object as any pr0n you could find online; the fact that she doesn't take it off in the movie or the game is almost immaterial, since you can pretty much see what's there anyway.
Bottom line: porn is all in the head, and if you like Laura Croft that much, you can't say that porn is automatically wrong.
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In the original story (by Hans Christian Andersen), the bargain is that the mermaid will be given legs in exchange for her voice, but every step will be extremely painful, like she is walking on knives. If she doesn't get the kiss of true love by the third sunset, she'll die. The mermaid fails to get the prince to kiss her by the third sunset, and the sea witch shows up to offer her one final choice - if she will kill the prince, his blood will return her to mermaid form and she can return to the sea. She chooses instead to die because she really loves the guy, but in the end it turns out death has really turned her into some sort of air spirit instead.
It's not exactly happily ever after, but it rings pretty true to me. Sometimes true love just won't happen even when you really need it to.
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All right, I admit that was an exaggeration and somewhat of a cheap shot. No insult was intended, I assure you. Hopefully that assuages the knob that moderated my post as a troll (if anything, the parent post of this thread is the troll).
I still feel that the horizons of computing are unlimited on Linux, and sharply bounded on Windows by the limits that Microsoft has put in place in the interests of so-called ease of use as well as Microsoft's business ambitions. You can learn something everyday on Windows, probably for the rest of your life, but you can't necessarily learn and do what you really want to do. The whole attitude of Windows is that it's both Microsoft's beachhead and puppet string into your home, your life, and your business. I've used Windows in the past, and I can no longer live with the thought of providing anyone with that level of control over me, no matter how convenient it is. YMMV - I don't really intend to convince anyone with these arguments, but the question was raised and I thought I would explain my personal feelings on the topic a little.
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A developer can't really win, though - if a statically linked version of gnucash was released, the story would be "damn, this free software is so bloated! etc.". Heads you win, tails I lose:)
Most of the Gnome 1.4 stuff is actually from Ximian (at least on my system), so you just have to wait for Ximian to pick up gnucash as a supported package, and then their installer will automagically set you up with it. You can either have the software right away and go through some configuration headaches, wait a little bit for it and avoid the configuration problems, or if you're really in a hurry you can pay a gnucash developer to build you a special staticly-linked version. Unfortunately, you can't get software with no configuration issues without waiting and for free.
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Congratulations, Microsoft has successfully duplicated (er, I mean "innovated") the technology of multiple shared libraries and LD_LIBRARY_PATH. They're only how many years late to the party?:)
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For me personally, it's all about control and the long-term point of view. Microsoft has a very arrogant attitude about what I can do on my computer, and Linux doesn't. Each subsequent Microsoft OS has gone further down the path of removing user control and substituting control by Microsoft; and now they're embarking down the path of allowing control by large media interests. I also have some reservations about Microsoft's business practices, so if I were to use Windows I would be implicitly supporting them which I don't want to do. I guess it's a "superior" platform if you're just another bump-on-the-log in front of a monitor, writing email to Mom and playing Tribes, but I prefer to really use my computer, and Linux lets me and in fact encourages me to do so.
The pain of dealing with Linux isn't enough to overcome the disadvantages (both current and expected to arise in the future) of using a Microsoft platform. And with each passing year, Linux gets easier to use, Windows becomes more restrictive, and Microsoft exerts more and more power over the software industry. I don't have a lot of faith that if I "upgrade" to Windows, Microsoft will look out for my best interests in the same way that the like-minded global community of free software hackers has done.
...well, you asked:)
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It's never necessary, unless of course you want one of the cool new features in that library. It doesn't take too many active developers before you're pulling in a lot of new technology and thus a lot of new library dependencies.
For most people this won't be a problem since their distro will figure it out, and for everybody else that's trying to install RPMs or build from source, take a look at the mailing list archives on gnucash.org. If gnucash didn't use brand-new tools like Guppi and Gnome 1.4 libs, much of the cool new stuff in gnucash 1.6 wouldn't be there.
It's not really DLL hell, since you can have multiple copies of the same library installed for use by different apps. DLL hell would be if gnucash blew away the libs that gnumeric needs, and then reinstalling gnumeric screwed up the libs that nautilus wants, etc.
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Yes, but their business in France does follow French laws. It's their businesses outside of France that they want to get a ruling on.
Are all McDonald's worldwide subject to the health restrictions levied on them in the U.S., the U.K, India, or South Africa? Why should multinational companies have to follow the lowest common denominator law in all countries just because they have a physical business presence in one repressive or backward place?
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If you work for a big company that produces a lot of confidential documents, it's difficult to keep track of them and make sure they're stored securely. It would be useful to be able to find all documents across web servers, SMB shares, etc., check them for proprietary or confidential markings, and generate a report for the people that keep track of this sort of thing.
As far as privacy goes, whether or not you have an expectation of privacy on your work machine, you would have to be really dumb to leave anything personally sensitive on it. So I'm not bemoaning the loss of a privacy that never really existed.
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But in that case, infrared scanning would be legal, since it doesn't illuminate the target with any radiation of its own, it just uses the ambient radiation given off by the target. I don't think that's where the line is.
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I think this was on/. a while back, although I can't find the link. You could basically see through clothing in a blurry black & white way, including counting buttons on a shirt, zippers, coins in a pocket, etc. It was being proposed for airport security.
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The scary part is - what happens once these devices are available to the public, as bionic eye implants or something? Do we lose this expectation of privacy all over again?
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A 1000 year non-obsolescence requirement is a little over the top, don't you think? Almost no original copies of any books from that period have lasted until now, so it's not like paper book technology has been that long lived. And in many cases you couldn't just sit down and read a book from 1000 years ago - even if it was in your language, the script and conventions used might make it fairly difficult. Yes, we still have paper books today, but in large part they're not the exact same ones or even the same technology we had a millennia ago (heck, they were hand-copied!), so why should an ebook have to do so well?
As long as it's possible to migrate ebook content onto the next generation of devices, we'll be OK. The only problem will be if ebook manufacturers make that impossible through technical or legal means.
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Slashdot Mirror
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If a CTO wants "professional" Linux, they can pay RedHat or some other services company for it, and good luck to them. But that's no reason that the rest of us can't enjoy it the way we have been all along.
Me, I'm happy to live in a world where I can configure and use Linux in business during the day, and laugh about ESR's antics after work. The guy's an inspiration and a good indication of the level of energy and inventiveness going into the platform. If that spirit of playful curiosity remains, it won't take long to defeat however many billions of dollars worth of business ambition, consumer disregard, FUD, and greed.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Maybe if you would just bring it a shrubbery? A nice one, not too big...
Courtesy of xscreensaver/hacks/screenhack.h, and reprinted 'cause it's so damn funny and this is a worthy article:
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
That makes plenty of sense. The only problem is if you don't actually own the software - if your University has some rule about how they own everything you submit to them, then you can't really relicense anything under the GPL since you're not the copyright holder. That's going to be the big stumbling block for most students.
IANAL either.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
"They say that absence makes the heart grow fungus."
Damn, is that a great album :)
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1.6 is based on an integral type (gnc_numeric). This is one of the big changes since 1.4. I'm not sure if a round-off error was ever demonstrated to have occurred with the old code, though.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
How is that any different from current U.S. dollars? They're printed by the government, they're not tied to gold, and you use them because the government says to. The only difference seems to be that Continentals were supposedly tied to gold even though they weren't, whereas currently dollars aren't even remotely tied to gold. They seem a lot more similar than they are different to me at least.
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No, you're thinking of Gnumeric. Gnucash would need a skin that looks like MS Money.
It already looks better than the last Windows financial software I used, MS Money 2.0, although I don't know what MS Money $LATEST looks like.
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Just because the dollar has been a fairly stable fiat doesn't make it any less of a fiat. True, commodities have no unique value, because the value will change with supply and demand (although central banks change the value of fiat money as well). Commodities do have inherent value, though, which is equal to what you can get for them on the market. Fiat money has a face value which is different from the open market value of the commodity that the fiat currency supposedly represents.
I'm not necessarily in favor of returning to a gold standard, but let's be clear on terms here: the U.S. dollar is established by fiat of the government, it is not based on anything real anymore, and its stability rests on the money management ability of the U.S. government, not on any real-world estimation of value.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
As long as posts such as yours are visible, I hardly think /. is a PR mouthpiece. Heck, the easiest way to get moderated up around here is to point out problems with Linux, why Microsoft isn't so bad, why the GPL is wrong, etc., etc. And as I discovered the other day just stating your personal reasons to use Linux as opposed to Microsoft software is a good way to get moderated down as a troll. Maybe the front-page news items betray a smidgin of bias from time to time (although I think the editors have made it clear that they do prefer Linux and aren't ashamed to talk it up), but come on - who reads just the front page. As has always been the case on this forum, whenever there's BS on the front page, the highest-rated comment is someone being called on it. I don't see that changing any time soon.
In light of the Register article about Microsoft doctoring the WSJ article and then restoring it, maybe you should reexamine your perceptions of who has more integrity?
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
I had all of those stories combined into one volume, The Mad Scientists Club. They were all great, my favorite was probably "The Secret of the Old Cannon", although I couldn't tell you why.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
But if you're really using Laura Croft for the same purposes of titillation (hee hee), doesn't it all come down to the same thing? She's as much a sex object as any pr0n you could find online; the fact that she doesn't take it off in the movie or the game is almost immaterial, since you can pretty much see what's there anyway.
Bottom line: porn is all in the head, and if you like Laura Croft that much, you can't say that porn is automatically wrong.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Spoiler Alert so don't say I didn't warn you :)
In the original story (by Hans Christian Andersen), the bargain is that the mermaid will be given legs in exchange for her voice, but every step will be extremely painful, like she is walking on knives. If she doesn't get the kiss of true love by the third sunset, she'll die. The mermaid fails to get the prince to kiss her by the third sunset, and the sea witch shows up to offer her one final choice - if she will kill the prince, his blood will return her to mermaid form and she can return to the sea. She chooses instead to die because she really loves the guy, but in the end it turns out death has really turned her into some sort of air spirit instead.
It's not exactly happily ever after, but it rings pretty true to me. Sometimes true love just won't happen even when you really need it to.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
All right, I admit that was an exaggeration and somewhat of a cheap shot. No insult was intended, I assure you. Hopefully that assuages the knob that moderated my post as a troll (if anything, the parent post of this thread is the troll).
I still feel that the horizons of computing are unlimited on Linux, and sharply bounded on Windows by the limits that Microsoft has put in place in the interests of so-called ease of use as well as Microsoft's business ambitions. You can learn something everyday on Windows, probably for the rest of your life, but you can't necessarily learn and do what you really want to do. The whole attitude of Windows is that it's both Microsoft's beachhead and puppet string into your home, your life, and your business. I've used Windows in the past, and I can no longer live with the thought of providing anyone with that level of control over me, no matter how convenient it is. YMMV - I don't really intend to convince anyone with these arguments, but the question was raised and I thought I would explain my personal feelings on the topic a little.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
A developer can't really win, though - if a statically linked version of gnucash was released, the story would be "damn, this free software is so bloated! etc.". Heads you win, tails I lose :)
Most of the Gnome 1.4 stuff is actually from Ximian (at least on my system), so you just have to wait for Ximian to pick up gnucash as a supported package, and then their installer will automagically set you up with it. You can either have the software right away and go through some configuration headaches, wait a little bit for it and avoid the configuration problems, or if you're really in a hurry you can pay a gnucash developer to build you a special staticly-linked version. Unfortunately, you can't get software with no configuration issues without waiting and for free.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Congratulations, Microsoft has successfully duplicated (er, I mean "innovated") the technology of multiple shared libraries and LD_LIBRARY_PATH. They're only how many years late to the party? :)
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For me personally, it's all about control and the long-term point of view. Microsoft has a very arrogant attitude about what I can do on my computer, and Linux doesn't. Each subsequent Microsoft OS has gone further down the path of removing user control and substituting control by Microsoft; and now they're embarking down the path of allowing control by large media interests. I also have some reservations about Microsoft's business practices, so if I were to use Windows I would be implicitly supporting them which I don't want to do. I guess it's a "superior" platform if you're just another bump-on-the-log in front of a monitor, writing email to Mom and playing Tribes, but I prefer to really use my computer, and Linux lets me and in fact encourages me to do so.
The pain of dealing with Linux isn't enough to overcome the disadvantages (both current and expected to arise in the future) of using a Microsoft platform. And with each passing year, Linux gets easier to use, Windows becomes more restrictive, and Microsoft exerts more and more power over the software industry. I don't have a lot of faith that if I "upgrade" to Windows, Microsoft will look out for my best interests in the same way that the like-minded global community of free software hackers has done.
...well, you asked :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
It's never necessary, unless of course you want one of the cool new features in that library. It doesn't take too many active developers before you're pulling in a lot of new technology and thus a lot of new library dependencies.
For most people this won't be a problem since their distro will figure it out, and for everybody else that's trying to install RPMs or build from source, take a look at the mailing list archives on gnucash.org. If gnucash didn't use brand-new tools like Guppi and Gnome 1.4 libs, much of the cool new stuff in gnucash 1.6 wouldn't be there.
It's not really DLL hell, since you can have multiple copies of the same library installed for use by different apps. DLL hell would be if gnucash blew away the libs that gnumeric needs, and then reinstalling gnumeric screwed up the libs that nautilus wants, etc.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Yes, but their business in France does follow French laws. It's their businesses outside of France that they want to get a ruling on.
Are all McDonald's worldwide subject to the health restrictions levied on them in the U.S., the U.K, India, or South Africa? Why should multinational companies have to follow the lowest common denominator law in all countries just because they have a physical business presence in one repressive or backward place?
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
If you work for a big company that produces a lot of confidential documents, it's difficult to keep track of them and make sure they're stored securely. It would be useful to be able to find all documents across web servers, SMB shares, etc., check them for proprietary or confidential markings, and generate a report for the people that keep track of this sort of thing.
As far as privacy goes, whether or not you have an expectation of privacy on your work machine, you would have to be really dumb to leave anything personally sensitive on it. So I'm not bemoaning the loss of a privacy that never really existed.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Maybe if you could see the guy's electrical meter from the street? I'm not sure either.
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But in that case, infrared scanning would be legal, since it doesn't illuminate the target with any radiation of its own, it just uses the ambient radiation given off by the target. I don't think that's where the line is.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
I think this was on /. a while back, although I can't find the link. You could basically see through clothing in a blurry black & white way, including counting buttons on a shirt, zippers, coins in a pocket, etc. It was being proposed for airport security.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
The scary part is - what happens once these devices are available to the public, as bionic eye implants or something? Do we lose this expectation of privacy all over again?
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
A 1000 year non-obsolescence requirement is a little over the top, don't you think? Almost no original copies of any books from that period have lasted until now, so it's not like paper book technology has been that long lived. And in many cases you couldn't just sit down and read a book from 1000 years ago - even if it was in your language, the script and conventions used might make it fairly difficult. Yes, we still have paper books today, but in large part they're not the exact same ones or even the same technology we had a millennia ago (heck, they were hand-copied!), so why should an ebook have to do so well?
As long as it's possible to migrate ebook content onto the next generation of devices, we'll be OK. The only problem will be if ebook manufacturers make that impossible through technical or legal means.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!