Way to go McNealy, if we mix content and transport there won't be any network neutrality.
If anything, there ought to be anti-trust legislation preventing the same company to own transport and content, and preferable not "enabling technology" (browsers, operating systems) either.
That would create a huge backlash of anti-EU feelings and seeing as Ireland is the only country who is going to have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (Ireland are the only nation to have referendums for EU treaties), the EU would want to be quite nice to Ireland (Irish people have a habit of voting No to EU treaties). Ireland is very EU positive, and likely the country that has benefited most from EU membership. They hve basically gone from a third world status to one of the richest members of the union. Being richer than their old colonial masters (UK) is particularly pleasing to the Irish. Ireland did vote no once, but regarded it as a mistake, and they redid the referendum with the proper outcome. Denmark did something similar in 1992, but got some exceptions instead (we stay out of the Euro, the military and legal collaboration, and don't have EU citizenship).
France and Holland votes no in 2005 to the "union constitution" which was then dead. To avoid a repeat of that all countries has pledged to avoid a referendums on the revised text, except Ireland whose constitution demands a referendum. Even Denmark also skip the referendum, despite having voted on every new treaty since 1973. Instead we will et another vote on the exceptions (which we have voted to keep twice already).
They just spell it Windows Services for UNIX. It includes GCC and many other GNU utilities, no reason to reverse engineer them when you can already redistribute them for free.
The UNG name is way to cure at too many levels for Microsoft, but congratulation to the author of the fake leak for making it/..
vast swathes of time and money will be wasted as students learn I really doubt that the Google consider the time and money wasted that they spend on student learning, especially when they, as you point out, learn the social and technical tools for collaborating on free software. Here are the rest of the stated Google goals:
# Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development # Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers; # Provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer (think "flip bits, not burgers"); # Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette).
GIMP and OpenOffice are perfect examples. I don't know which proprietary Linux paint program GIMP replaced.
OpenOffice is an even worse example, it was a non-free program (StarOffice) until it was "liberated" by Sun in order to spite a corporate enemy. If anything, StarOffice is an example of the duplication going on in the non-free world.
Unfortunately, apart from a few apps (Apache, maybe Linux), I don't see where much has been "created" with the open source methodology...I just see programs that offer rough approximations of the apps they are trying to mimic. The keyword is "I see" because it just tells about the path you have gone. Some of us have traveled a different path, and seen more. The Internet and the Web started from "open source methodologies". The commercial IDE's mostly borrow their ideas from free predecessors. Most of games just add polish to ideas that were tested out with free software.
Not to mention stuff like TeX which have had a huge influence on computerized typesetting (and is yet unsurpassed). TeX is open source, even if not "open source methodology". Like the original BSD (also hugely influential) was "open source methodology" but not "open source".
Didn't realize that free air is made by an intense effort of people applying their talents. Free oxygen is created by plants through an intense effort of photosynthesis. We really should destroy all plant life in order to create a market for artificially extracted oxygen.
Someone please enlighten me. Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free. I don't program for free. Well, I do, a bit as a hobby, but my main job is full time salaried programming job. The code I write happens to be released under a free license, but the basic situation is no different than if I wrote non-free software. I'm paid for my work and my skill, not my code. Just like just about everybody else in a modern economy.
So what does it mean that my code is free? It means that I can continue to use it, in whole or in part, if I switch job. It provides me with a much greater degree of freedom than if I did the same work and the software was not released under a free software license.
So the question isn't really what I, as a programmer, gain from the software being free. I gain the same freedom as the users, even more so as I can obviously take advantage of the freedom to modify the software. The question is what my employer gain be making my code free.
To answer that, we first have to get rid of one common misconception. Most people see only mass duplicated generic software, much of it intended for end-user sale. But that doesn't mean that most software created is like that. In fact, it is quote the opposite. The majority of software is created in order to solve a specific problem, not for sale. So your client or employer has not really strong reasons to keep the software non-free, as long as it solves his problem. And there is good reasons to make it free:
1) It opens up for inclusion of code from the world of copylefted software, decreasing cose and/or increasing functionality.
2) It opens up "third party contributions", which may add functionality for free.
3) It makes the programmer happy, since he gets more freedom.
And no, it is not rare. Another misconception is that free software programmers are usually hobbyists or students. But a EU financed study indicate that around half of the developers surveyed are in fact developing the free software as part of our jobs. And if you look at it from the other side, of the widely used free software projects, you will find that the main developers are almost all paid full time to work on the project.
Software wasn't a commodity when computers entered the corporate world, ad-hoc solutions for single client was the norm, even for small businesses. When I was a student, it was not uncommon for us to earn some money doing an inventory system for a local business. I see no reason why the ad-hoc solutions wouldn't have consolidated into more generic solutions under a free software market, with consultants collaborating and competing for the best service. It would have been a very different world though.
With regard to the home world, computers only really became a standard equipment much later with the WWW. The WWW was almost entirely fueled by free software or at least gratis software. The non-free solutions were a reaction, once it was clear that Al Gore's project would succeed. They were never the driving force.
When another producer in your market has the ability to indefinitely create products whose quality and cost make them preferable to anything you can create, that is supposed to destroy the market for your products. It's a form of "creative destruction", a process in which going out of business is just the final signal to the terminally clueless that yes, it really is time for you to find a job you're better at. Does this apply to people who lose their jobs due to (possible off-shore) outsourcing?
I'd say yes, but my impression is that the majority of slashdoters consider outsourcing an evil.
You knowledge of scooters mean you can do your "work" (moving from point A to point B) faster than I can. Similarly, someone knowing a computer well can do his work with the computer faster than someone who don't.
I have spend years playing with Emacs, and as a result, I can do stuff in seconds that others spends hours on with lesser tools. Seconds compared to hours sounds like a great win, but only if you ignore the years mentioned earlier in the sentence.
Basically, learning your tools does wonders for productivity, but has to be hold up with the cost of the investment. If your primary tools is the computer, investing in learning it is likely to pay off.
Silicon Valley has and continues to derive the vast majority of its income from intellectual property protections for its software.
It could be true. Do you have numbers backing up that claim, or are you just assuming it must be true because that is how your world looks like?
Regardless, Microsoft (which is no longer a Silicon Valley firm, I know) would make no money today if XP and Vista were free.
I believe Microsoft Office would continue to sell well even if XP and Vista were free. I also believe that the vast majority of businesses and many home users would pay for a subscription to "Windows Update", even if the underlying operating system is free.
Intel would make no money if anybody could just copy Intel chips.
You mean, if anyone had a billion dollar fab in their backyard? Technically true, as you can interfer anything from a false premise.
If they were free, nobody would bother with Linux.
They? The people? Intel? Linux? XP and Vista? Well, if SunOS had been free when Linus started, Linux has probably not existed. But XP and Vista is hardly relevant. Even if we only look at commercial Linux applications today. Linux exists basically in two domains, servers and embedded. For servers, Linux has a huge advantage of being similar to the "old" dominating technology, namely Unix. This is probably at least as important as being free. For the embedded market, XP and Vista is not even relevant. Wince (or whatever it is called today) is the Microsoft entry on that market, and is, unlike XP and Linux, widely regarded as crap.
Where are the linux billionaires?
The existence of billionaires is a sign that the market forces are not working efficiently. One of the premises behind open source is that it is a more efficient way of producing code. If so, we would not expect billionaires.
Nor would biotech companies make any money if anybody could just copy their inventions.
Actually, many does already. Namely those that produce "patent expired" commodities. What you meant to say is that private medicine research would no longer be viable, and we thus would have to make do with the 70% of health research that public financed. The short immediate effect would be that new medicine would be produced at a slightly slower rate, but be much more affordable. It would probably cost the lives of hundred of thousands of rich people, and save the lives of hundred of millions of poor people, worldwide. Of course, we could use some of the money we save on medicine to finance more public research, and thus save the hundred of thousands of rich people as well.
Sun, AIX, etc. all made fortunes in their time from selling proprietary flavors of Unix.
Actually, Sun made its fortune selling good hardware with stock BSD sofwtare. The software they developed themselves they made the specs free, and sold a reference implementation for a nominal (or no) fee. This made them the standard leader on the workstation market.
AIX in this context is not a company but a family of operating system from IBM, which also made its fortune selling hardware (especially high quality typewriters).
SAS and SPSS are the industry standards for statistical computing, and they are proprietary, intellectually protected, for-profit firms.
We use and teach our students "R" instead, life is so much easier when we can just point partners to a free software website, rather than worry about their financial situation. The value of a product drops drastically when a price is placed on it, there is just so much less you use it for.
In general, you seem to suffer from bad case of "political correctness". That is, you "know" the "correct" answer, and deduce the supporting facts from that. (Or, you may just be trolling, but it was fun to answer).
You also seem to suffer from the delusion that the purpose of the economy i
Lessig's 'Free Culture' on pirate bay?
on
The Economics of Free
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Lawrence Lessig has made his Free Culture book available for free. Chris Anderson is not very credible unless he does the same with his book.
My problem with Islam is that when a person is externally forced to behave well, that might make the streets safer if done effectively, but that person is still not a good person. Actually, that is my main problem with Christianity. Judging a person not on how they behave, but how they are inside. That is just sick. People should be accountable for their actions, not for their thoughts. That is one of the few things Islam get right. Actually, maybe it is the only thing Islam gets right.
I think it is a difference between EU and US. There is a lot of fear among "moderate" Muslims in Europe about speaking up against the extremists. Far the majority of religiously motivated violence in Europe is extremest Muslims attacking other Muslims they don't consider "Muslim" enough. This goes from murder attempts on Muslim political leaders and academics that are speaking against the extremists, to harassment of women with Arabic names who dress in western style.
I'm not sure why this is not the case in the US, maybe it is the lower density, or that the "homelands" are farther away. Or maybe you are simply better at integrating immigrants.
Last century, as many if not more atrocities was done in the name of an atheist ideology (namely communism) as was done in the name of all the theist ideologies combines.
Your "solution" is just the same as the "solution" shared by all the missionary religions, just "convert" everyone to our point of view, and everything will be good.
It was all of them this time, unlike the first time the were printed. The cartoon in question was the "bomb in turban" drawing from the top of the original article. The were reprinted as a reaction to an alleged murder plot against the cartoonist.
I'm not sure what kind of reasoning will lead anyone to attempt to murder somebody for insinuating that their prophet inspire violent behavior. By doing so, they just prove the cartoonist right.
Yes, but since the OP implied he would discount contra-evidence because of his belief I for one wouldn't want him on ANY jury. And since you implied that you like raping children, I wouldn't want you to work in ANY school.
Yes! You are completely right, it is so much easier to argue not against what other people say, but against your own twisted interpretation of what they probably mean. Thank you for teaching me this valuable lesson in debate technique.
Oh, Emacs just recently acquired bloat and feeping creaturism?
Actually, I see the problem as the exact opposite. It used to be that people would ask themselves "I got this huge powerful 20 MHz computer with 4 megabytes of RAM, how will I ever I ever use all that power", and the nerd overhearing it would answer "use Emacs", and despite advances in computers, Emacs could keep track and was always the program that could fully utilize your hardware.
However, somewhere along the way we lost out to the competition. I see kids in the Emacs fora who, with a straight face, say they prefer Emacs because it is such as lean and mean editing machine. It is so sad. People nowadays go to Microsoft, KDE or Gnome for software to fully utilize their machines. In the olden days, Emacs would have offered a superset of all of these environments!
I think it is good RMS is stepping back. We need young people to revitalize Emacs, and once again make it a leader in resource consumption. We need to get back to our roots. We need EGACS: Eight Gigabytes And Constantly Swapping.
You're assuming that all of those murderers play videogames. I'd be quite skeptical thats the case. No, I say that if the murderers play videogames at the same rate as the rest of the population, he is off by a couple of orders of magnitude. If murderers are less likely to play videogames ("negative correlation"), he might still be right.
The first thread here devolve into a discussion of the "large hard on collider", and you want the editors to stop catering for adolescent mentalities?
Being professional means knowing your audience.
And listing four other fora that does avoid pop culture references is not an argument for/. to do the same. Quite the opposite, it is argument that that market is already well covered, and/. should continue to do what it does best.
GP's claim was one in a billion player is also a murderer, you claim is that it is only one in a million. Most recent US murder rate is around 59 victims per million people per year. So unless there is a strong negative correlation between games and murder (which is quite likely), you are still off by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Way to go McNealy, if we mix content and transport there won't be any network neutrality.
If anything, there ought to be anti-trust legislation preventing the same company to own transport and content, and preferable not "enabling technology" (browsers, operating systems) either.
> Microsoft is 33, Linux is barely 17.
Microsoft is has only been 15 years in the server market, unless you count Xenix or third party add-ons to MS Windows. Linux was there from the start.
> hmm, will it be Illegal for MS to screw Linux?
In US yes, in (most of) EU no.
France and Holland votes no in 2005 to the "union constitution" which was then dead. To avoid a repeat of that all countries has pledged to avoid a referendums on the revised text, except Ireland whose constitution demands a referendum. Even Denmark also skip the referendum, despite having voted on every new treaty since 1973. Instead we will et another vote on the exceptions (which we have voted to keep twice already).
They just spell it Windows Services for UNIX. It includes GCC and many other GNU utilities, no reason to reverse engineer them when you can already redistribute them for free.
/..
The UNG name is way to cure at too many levels for Microsoft, but congratulation to the author of the fake leak for making it
# Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development
# Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers;
# Provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer (think "flip bits, not burgers");
# Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette).
OpenOffice is an even worse example, it was a non-free program (StarOffice) until it was "liberated" by Sun in order to spite a corporate enemy. If anything, StarOffice is an example of the duplication going on in the non-free world. Unfortunately, apart from a few apps (Apache, maybe Linux), I don't see where
much has been "created" with the open source methodology...I just see programs that offer rough approximations of the apps they are trying to mimic. The keyword is "I see" because it just tells about the path you have gone. Some of us have traveled a different path, and seen more. The Internet and the Web started from "open source methodologies". The commercial IDE's mostly borrow their ideas from free predecessors. Most of games just add polish to ideas that were tested out with free software.
Not to mention stuff like TeX which have had a huge influence on computerized typesetting (and is yet unsurpassed). TeX is open source, even if not "open source methodology". Like the original BSD (also hugely influential) was "open source methodology" but not "open source".
So what does it mean that my code is free? It means that I can continue to use it, in whole or in part, if I switch job. It provides me with a much greater degree of freedom than if I did the same work and the software was not released under a free software license.
So the question isn't really what I, as a programmer, gain from the software being free. I gain the same freedom as the users, even more so as I can obviously take advantage of the freedom to modify the software. The question is what my employer gain be making my code free.
To answer that, we first have to get rid of one common misconception. Most people see only mass duplicated generic software, much of it intended for end-user sale. But that doesn't mean that most software created is like that. In fact, it is quote the opposite. The majority of software is created in order to solve a specific problem, not for sale. So your client or employer has not really strong reasons to keep the software non-free, as long as it solves his problem. And there is good reasons to make it free:
1) It opens up for inclusion of code from the world of copylefted software, decreasing cose and/or increasing functionality.
2) It opens up "third party contributions", which may add functionality for free.
3) It makes the programmer happy, since he gets more freedom.
And no, it is not rare. Another misconception is that free software programmers are usually hobbyists or students. But a EU financed study indicate that around half of the developers surveyed are in fact developing the free software as part of our jobs. And if you look at it from the other side, of the widely used free software projects, you will find that the main developers are almost all paid full time to work on the project.
Software wasn't a commodity when computers entered the corporate world, ad-hoc solutions for single client was the norm, even for small businesses. When I was a student, it was not uncommon for us to earn some money doing an inventory system for a local business. I see no reason why the ad-hoc solutions wouldn't have consolidated into more generic solutions under a free software market, with consultants collaborating and competing for the best service. It would have been a very different world though.
With regard to the home world, computers only really became a standard equipment much later with the WWW. The WWW was almost entirely fueled by free software or at least gratis software. The non-free solutions were a reaction, once it was clear that Al Gore's project would succeed. They were never the driving force.
I'd say yes, but my impression is that the majority of slashdoters consider outsourcing an evil.
You knowledge of scooters mean you can do your "work" (moving from point A to point B) faster than I can. Similarly, someone knowing a computer well can do his work with the computer faster than someone who don't.
I have spend years playing with Emacs, and as a result, I can do stuff in seconds that others spends hours on with lesser tools. Seconds compared to hours sounds like a great win, but only if you ignore the years mentioned earlier in the sentence.
Basically, learning your tools does wonders for productivity, but has to be hold up with the cost of the investment. If your primary tools is the computer, investing in learning it is likely to pay off.
Silicon Valley has and continues to derive the vast majority of its income from intellectual property protections for its software.
It could be true. Do you have numbers backing up that claim, or are you just assuming it must be true because that is how your world looks like?
Regardless, Microsoft (which is no longer a Silicon Valley firm, I know) would make no money today if XP and Vista were free.
I believe Microsoft Office would continue to sell well even if XP and Vista were free. I also believe that the vast majority of businesses and many home users would pay for a subscription to "Windows Update", even if the underlying operating system is free.
Intel would make no money if anybody could just copy Intel chips.
You mean, if anyone had a billion dollar fab in their backyard? Technically true, as you can interfer anything from a false premise.
If they were free, nobody would bother with Linux.
They? The people? Intel? Linux? XP and Vista? Well, if SunOS had been free when Linus started, Linux has probably not existed. But XP and Vista is hardly relevant. Even if we only look at commercial Linux applications today. Linux exists basically in two domains, servers and embedded. For servers, Linux has a huge advantage of being similar to the "old" dominating technology, namely Unix. This is probably at least as important as being free. For the embedded market, XP and Vista is not even relevant. Wince (or whatever it is called today) is the Microsoft entry on that market, and is, unlike XP and Linux, widely regarded as crap.
Where are the linux billionaires?
The existence of billionaires is a sign that the market forces are not working efficiently. One of the premises behind open source is that it is a more efficient way of producing code. If so, we would not expect billionaires.
Nor would biotech companies make any money if anybody could just copy their inventions.
Actually, many does already. Namely those that produce "patent expired" commodities. What you meant to say is that private medicine research would no longer be viable, and we thus would have to make do with the 70% of health research that public financed. The short immediate effect would be that new medicine would be produced at a slightly slower rate, but be much more affordable. It would probably cost the lives of hundred of thousands of rich people, and save the lives of hundred of millions of poor people, worldwide. Of course, we could use some of the money we save on medicine to finance more public research, and thus save the hundred of thousands of rich people as well.
Sun, AIX, etc. all made fortunes in their time from selling proprietary flavors of Unix.
Actually, Sun made its fortune selling good hardware with stock BSD sofwtare. The software they developed themselves they made the specs free, and sold a reference implementation for a nominal (or no) fee. This made them the standard leader on the workstation market.
AIX in this context is not a company but a family of operating system from IBM, which also made its fortune selling hardware (especially high quality typewriters).
SAS and SPSS are the industry standards for statistical computing, and they are proprietary, intellectually protected, for-profit firms.
We use and teach our students "R" instead, life is so much easier when we can just point partners to a free software website, rather than worry about their financial situation. The value of a product drops drastically when a price is placed on it, there is just so much less you use it for.
In general, you seem to suffer from bad case of "political correctness". That is, you "know" the "correct" answer, and deduce the supporting facts from that. (Or, you may just be trolling, but it was fun to answer).
You also seem to suffer from the delusion that the purpose of the economy i
Lawrence Lessig has made his Free Culture book available for free. Chris Anderson is not very credible unless he does the same with his book.
That would be cheating!I think it is a difference between EU and US. There is a lot of fear among "moderate" Muslims in Europe about speaking up against the extremists. Far the majority of religiously motivated violence in Europe is extremest Muslims attacking other Muslims they don't consider "Muslim" enough. This goes from murder attempts on Muslim political leaders and academics that are speaking against the extremists, to harassment of women with Arabic names who dress in western style.
I'm not sure why this is not the case in the US, maybe it is the lower density, or that the "homelands" are farther away. Or maybe you are simply better at integrating immigrants.
Last century, as many if not more atrocities was done in the name of an atheist ideology (namely communism) as was done in the name of all the theist ideologies combines.
Your "solution" is just the same as the "solution" shared by all the missionary religions, just "convert" everyone to our point of view, and everything will be good.
How do they manage to disguise their scimitars and poulaines?
Saudi-Arabia is one of the richest countries in the world, and also one of the most oppressive theist regimes in the world.
And like Pakistan, we already trade with them, so I don't think you are on the right path.
It was all of them this time, unlike the first time the were printed. The cartoon in question was the "bomb in turban" drawing from the top of the original article. The were reprinted as a reaction to an alleged murder plot against the cartoonist.
I'm not sure what kind of reasoning will lead anyone to attempt to murder somebody for insinuating that their prophet inspire violent behavior. By doing so, they just prove the cartoonist right.
Yes! You are completely right, it is so much easier to argue not against what other people say, but against your own twisted interpretation of what they probably mean. Thank you for teaching me this valuable lesson in debate technique.
Oh, Emacs just recently acquired bloat and feeping creaturism?
Actually, I see the problem as the exact opposite. It used to be that people would ask themselves "I got this huge powerful 20 MHz computer with 4 megabytes of RAM, how will I ever I ever use all that power", and the nerd overhearing it would answer "use Emacs", and despite advances in computers, Emacs could keep track and was always the program that could fully utilize your hardware.
However, somewhere along the way we lost out to the competition. I see kids in the Emacs fora who, with a straight face, say they prefer Emacs because it is such as lean and mean editing machine. It is so sad. People nowadays go to Microsoft, KDE or Gnome for software to fully utilize their machines. In the olden days, Emacs would have offered a superset of all of these environments!
I think it is good RMS is stepping back. We need young people to revitalize Emacs, and once again make it a leader in resource consumption. We need to get back to our roots. We need EGACS: Eight Gigabytes And Constantly Swapping.
The first thread here devolve into a discussion of the "large hard on collider", and you want the editors to stop catering for adolescent mentalities?
/. to do the same. Quite the opposite, it is argument that that market is already well covered, and /. should continue to do what it does best.
Being professional means knowing your audience.
And listing four other fora that does avoid pop culture references is not an argument for
GP's claim was one in a billion player is also a murderer, you claim is that it is only one in a million. Most recent US murder rate is around 59 victims per million people per year. So unless there is a strong negative correlation between games and murder (which is quite likely), you are still off by a couple of orders of magnitude.