To you, $800 per replaced machine may seem like a deal, but for school systems with little or no money and plenty of smart students to do the installing, Linux seems like a nice, inexpensive deal, no?
On the other hand, if you'd asked "why not freebsd" then I might have agreed with you...
No, the artist ends up owing the label all the promotion and recording costs anyway. That's the way the system works already. Labels front the artists the cost of promotion and recording. The artists get a percentage of the sales minus the initial loan. Unless they are quite successful, artists make very little money from recordings anyway. This will have little or no effect on the RIAA's bottom-line.
Obviously you're not developing software, then. One of my co-workers had to reboot his windows 2000 box because we UNPLUGGED THE USB CD-WRITER!!! I kid you not, BSOD! Try it yourself if you don't believe me.
For me, the most important thing is MPlayers DirectFB support. (must be compiled into the kernel, of course) It's great! My standard has always been a DivX of the Matrix, which looks MUCH better in MPlayer than in any previous video-player app I've tried.
Yes but I guarantee that the Mozilla rendering engine com object would not be a drop in replacement for the IE object and tons of software would suddenly not work if it went missing.
Perhaps that is true now. On the other hand, Mozilla's Gecko is a piece of open source software. Surely it COULD be given a new API so it would be compatible with the IE HTML widget. All it takes is time - developer time and QA time.
Before we all jump on the WalMart bandwagon just because we think they are taking a swipe at Microsoft, we must remember that this is the company that used its power to force record labels to produce two copies of every album (one nice for Walmart and one naughty for everyone else).
1)No, we are jumping on the WalMart bandwagon because they are giving us an inexpensive choice. Little Mom&Pop stores NEVER give people inexpensive chioces.
Case in point, I tried to buy an inexpensive vacuum cleaner. Nobody had any. My choices were A)Sears, with their Kenmore line of vacuums or B)Small boutique shops with their expensive vacuums (cheapest was 200 bucks). C)WalMart, with a dozen different vacuums, one of which was about 100 dollars and actually vacuums my carpets now.
2)I don't really care how inconvenient the world is for RIAA-labels. Remember, they're trying to take away our rights.
Well, ok, suppose they only go open source on MOST of the computers. Most students DO NOT NEED Photoshop or Chemistry software to do their work. Those that do can use the "Photo-editing" or "Science-processing" lab.
Let's turn Windows into what it deserves to be, a niche player. Use Windows on only in specialized labs that need Windows-only software. Keep those labs in compliance, it will be easier to do when there are fewer of them. Attach the licenses to the boxes themselves (use tape...).
For the computers whose licenses you can't verify, switch to Linux. Easy to administer, does the most commonly needed 90% quite well: Linux, it just makes sense.
The directions for a bottle of shampoo or a box of Hamburger Helper are more complex than a 1040!
This is total BS. Obviously you've never filled out your own taxes.
The 1040 has 71 fields to fill out PLUS your address. Most of these lines are based on "schedules" and "worksheets" which also frequently have a dozen lines on them. The instructions for filling out the form are around 50 pages.
I'd say this is a lot more complicated than "lather, rinse, repeat".
This is a good idea. In a similar vein, this group at Carnegie Mellon have created an online agent that schedules events for users, with a plug-in for outlook that communicates with the agent.
"...Reduce the power of the government, and you reduce the number of people (corporations) who want to control it. Reduce the people trying to conrol it, and you reduce the amount of money flowing to politicians."
All right, finally we have a good debate. Ok, you've stated how libertarians see it. Now socialists, like me, say "Without a strong government, the strong are free to hurt the weak and the weak have no way to defend themselves." I'm sure you'd agree that the bill of rights is valuable, and having some way to enforce that is necessary.
Furthermore, I suspect most people would agree that some amount of government will always be necessary. I.e. we will always need a military to protect ourselves and a police force to stop the occasional nut. Y'know, traffic lights so we can drive the streets in safety. Garbage collection so the streets aren't full of trash.
So in other words, there's a limit to this "small government" thing. Yes, going back to services specified by the constitution as you propose would be a smaller, but it would not be better. For example, there was no concept of an Air Force in the original constitution. No internet. No kiddie porn. Hell, blacks were considered 2/3 of a person and women couldn't vote!
No, that's no solution. What we need is to remove the power of money in the government, not less government.
Here are some ideas that make sense to me:
1)Let's pass some legitimate campaign finance reform legislation. Maybe McCain-Feingold is a start.
2)Let's open the debates up to any candidate that has gotten on the ballot in >50% of the states. Ok, so maybe they won't win, but at least we can find out what they have to say.
3)(from Michael Moore's new book) Everybody, run for office THIS YEAR. Run for "precinct delegate", you might even win. Take control of your local (Democratic or Republican) party by attending meetings with 10 (or so) of your closest friends and using procedural motions to bring the debate around to the issues that matter to you. And write to your congresspeople, senators, president, governor, assembly, etc. Call them. Do whatever it takes. And vote! Every election, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!
I write web software applications for a living, and the company I work for has incorporated i18n support. Japanese is one of our supported languages.
I've done plenty of testing of this, and IMO, the Japanese support (and yes, even in text input fields) is fine in the latest Mozilla, Galeon, and Netscape 6.2. Why does anybody still use Netscape 4.X anyway?
This is so clearly a troll, and one of the classic ones, but I'll bite. You don't need to use the command line to install programs.
There are many GUI-based installation programs out there. I personally use Red Carpet from Ximian, but whatever.
Last night and this morning, I formatted an 80 gig hard drive and installed Red Hat 7.1 with Ximian Gnome. I used the command line NOT ONCE. And YES, I have all the programs I want including Mozilla, AbiWord, Star Office, Loki Demos, Evolution, Galeon.
But then you didn't really care about the validity of your argument, did you?
Like it or not, this country is a capitalist one. There are principals that apply here, and one of them is the right to "the pursuit of happiness" (see the Declaration of Independence), or in loose, modern terms, the right to "make money". (Yes, there are other things that people can to do pursue happiness, but for most people, making money is part of it.)
Couldn't a case be made for the enhancememt of society as a whole -- not some company -- that would justify the taming of current copyrite practices?
We're not talking about some horrible, evil group here. We're talking about people who want to publish high-quality copies of literature (Dover Press). I'd say that if we all have the right to public-domain literature that would enhance society as a whole, even if it means that some choose to use that right to make money. There's just no conflict here.
how the hell is it a monopoly? is MSN messenger just a figment of my imagination?
Look, you don't need to own an entire industry to be a monopoly. The lack of viable alternatives is what defines a monopoly. It's not a difficult concept.
If I want to do instant messenging, I have to use AOL's protocol (one of them, anyway... I happen to use TOC in the client I use) or I can't interoperate with other AIM users, which includes 90% of my co-workers and friends.
Yawn...
Microsoft makes an inexpensive database. According to the price/performance table, it seems to be really great.
On the other hand, if you look at JUST performance numbers, the difference becomes clear.
SQL server doesn't even make the list
Oh well, I guess you get what you pay for.
Nice idea, but a friend of mine tried this, but his ISP, UC Santa Cruz, doesn't allow anyone to have "open shares" on their computers. They threatened disconnecting him for doing this exact thing.
You're right, I had forgotten that Yahoo wasn't enabled by default. Here's what you do:
1)From the log-in screen, click Plugins
2)Next click Load (lower-left), it should take you to a file-chooser, where libyahoo.so is an option. Click OK to add it (NOTE: do this for any of MSN, ICQ, etc. as well)
3)Ok, now you should be all set. When you add an account, yahoo should be an option.
I've tried some of the other Yahoo! clients people have made. Frankly none of them compares to the "official" client.
I suppose it's offtopic, but gaim is a nice, powerful GPL'd instant messenger client for GTK. It speaks the Yahoo protocol plus about a dozen others including IRC, MSN, ICQ, and of course, AIM. It warns me if I have Yahoo mail, etc. There's a lot of active development on plug-ins for it, too.
And while you're at it, why not just put it up on a good old WebDAV server that you both have access to, and it will appear magically (via Web Folders) in Windows Explorer (or the DAV file system on Linux or Mac OSX).
It's hard to imagine anything easier and more transparent than that.
I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this, but it seems that ZDNet has seen the error of their ways, and posted a note above the poll. It says:
"On 21 December, ZDNet posted a story reporting the preliminary results of this poll, which showed a large majority of respondents who said they planned to deliver applications via Web services by the end of 2002 favoured Java for the job. At the time, Java outranked.Net by a factor of three in this poll. By early January, the position had reversed; the results are shown here. An investigation indicated that Microsoft employees used vote-rigging to distort the results. The full story can be found here."
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You really don't know why linux over Mac OSX?
Ok, I'll tell you: legacy hardware.
To you, $800 per replaced machine may seem like a deal, but for school systems with little or no money and plenty of smart students to do the installing, Linux seems like a nice, inexpensive deal, no?
On the other hand, if you'd asked "why not freebsd" then I might have agreed with you...
No, the artist ends up owing the label all the promotion and recording costs anyway. That's the way the system works already. Labels front the artists the cost of promotion and recording. The artists get a percentage of the sales minus the initial loan. Unless they are quite successful, artists make very little money from recordings anyway. This will have little or no effect on the RIAA's bottom-line.
Obviously you're not developing software, then. One of my co-workers had to reboot his windows 2000 box because we UNPLUGGED THE USB CD-WRITER!!! I kid you not, BSOD! Try it yourself if you don't believe me.
I can't agree more!
For me, the most important thing is MPlayers DirectFB support. (must be compiled into the kernel, of course) It's great! My standard has always been a DivX of the Matrix, which looks MUCH better in MPlayer than in any previous video-player app I've tried.
Yes but I guarantee that the Mozilla rendering engine com object would not be a drop in replacement for the IE object and tons of software would suddenly not work if it went missing.
Perhaps that is true now. On the other hand, Mozilla's Gecko is a piece of open source software. Surely it COULD be given a new API so it would be compatible with the IE HTML widget. All it takes is time - developer time and QA time.
Before we all jump on the WalMart bandwagon just because we think they are taking a swipe at Microsoft, we must remember that this is the company that used its power to force record labels to produce two copies of every album (one nice for Walmart and one naughty for everyone else).
1)No, we are jumping on the WalMart bandwagon because they are giving us an inexpensive choice. Little Mom&Pop stores NEVER give people inexpensive chioces.
Case in point, I tried to buy an inexpensive vacuum cleaner. Nobody had any. My choices were A)Sears, with their Kenmore line of vacuums or B)Small boutique shops with their expensive vacuums (cheapest was 200 bucks).
C)WalMart, with a dozen different vacuums, one of which was about 100 dollars and actually vacuums my carpets now.
2)I don't really care how inconvenient the world is for RIAA-labels. Remember, they're trying to take away our rights.
Well, ok, suppose they only go open source on MOST of the computers. Most students DO NOT NEED Photoshop or Chemistry software to do their work. Those that do can use the "Photo-editing" or "Science-processing" lab.
Let's turn Windows into what it deserves to be, a niche player. Use Windows on only in specialized labs that need Windows-only software. Keep those labs in compliance, it will be easier to do when there are fewer of them. Attach the licenses to the boxes themselves (use tape...).
For the computers whose licenses you can't verify, switch to Linux. Easy to administer, does the most commonly needed 90% quite well: Linux, it just makes sense.
The directions for a bottle of shampoo or a box of Hamburger Helper are more complex than a 1040!
This is total BS. Obviously you've never filled out your own taxes.
The 1040 has 71 fields to fill out PLUS your address. Most of these lines are based on "schedules" and "worksheets" which also frequently have a dozen lines on them. The instructions for filling out the form are around 50 pages.
I'd say this is a lot more complicated than "lather, rinse, repeat".
This is a good idea. In a similar vein,
this group at Carnegie Mellon have created an online agent that schedules events for users, with a plug-in for outlook that communicates with the agent.
actually, they just shut it down for "routine maintainance".
This may be intended as a parody, but it sure seems like plagarism from South Park episode #214, Chef Aid.
Which, by the way, was a really funny parody of Johnny Cochran's legendary "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." defense of OJ Simpson
"...Reduce the power of the government, and you reduce the number of people (corporations) who want to control it. Reduce the people trying to conrol it, and you reduce the amount of money flowing to politicians."
All right, finally we have a good debate. Ok, you've stated how libertarians see it. Now socialists, like me, say "Without a strong government, the strong are free to hurt the weak and the weak have no way to defend themselves." I'm sure you'd agree that the bill of rights is valuable, and having some way to enforce that is necessary.
Furthermore, I suspect most people would agree that some amount of government will always be necessary. I.e. we will always need a military to protect ourselves and a police force to stop the occasional nut. Y'know, traffic lights so we can drive the streets in safety. Garbage collection so the streets aren't full of trash.
So in other words, there's a limit to this "small government" thing. Yes, going back to services specified by the constitution as you propose would be a smaller, but it would not be better. For example, there was no concept of an Air Force in the original constitution. No internet. No kiddie porn. Hell, blacks were considered 2/3 of a person and women couldn't vote!
No, that's no solution. What we need is to remove the power of money in the government, not less government.
Here are some ideas that make sense to me:
1)Let's pass some legitimate campaign finance reform legislation. Maybe McCain-Feingold is a start.
2)Let's open the debates up to any candidate that has gotten on the ballot in >50% of the states. Ok, so maybe they won't win, but at least we can find out what they have to say.
3)(from Michael Moore's new book) Everybody, run for office THIS YEAR. Run for "precinct delegate", you might even win. Take control of your local (Democratic or Republican) party by attending meetings with 10 (or so) of your closest friends and using procedural motions to bring the debate around to the issues that matter to you. And write to your congresspeople, senators, president, governor, assembly, etc. Call them. Do whatever it takes. And vote! Every election, VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!
I write web software applications for a living, and the company I work for has incorporated i18n support. Japanese is one of our supported languages.
I've done plenty of testing of this, and IMO, the Japanese support (and yes, even in text input fields) is fine in the latest Mozilla, Galeon, and Netscape 6.2. Why does anybody still use Netscape 4.X anyway?
This is so clearly a troll, and one of the classic ones, but I'll bite. You don't need to use the command line to install programs.
There are many GUI-based installation programs out there. I personally use Red Carpet from Ximian, but whatever.
Last night and this morning, I formatted an 80 gig hard drive and installed Red Hat 7.1 with Ximian Gnome. I used the command line NOT ONCE. And YES, I have all the programs I want including Mozilla, AbiWord, Star Office, Loki Demos, Evolution, Galeon.
But then you didn't really care about the validity of your argument, did you?
Except for the RIAA, they gain and lose nothing.
Hell, even if you do this, the RIAA makes money.
Like it or not, this country is a capitalist one. There are principals that apply here, and one of them is the right to "the pursuit of happiness" (see the Declaration of Independence), or in loose, modern terms, the right to "make money". (Yes, there are other things that people can to do pursue happiness, but for most people, making money is part of it.)
Couldn't a case be made for the enhancememt of society as a whole -- not some company -- that would justify the taming of current copyrite practices?
We're not talking about some horrible, evil group here. We're talking about people who want to publish high-quality copies of literature (Dover Press). I'd say that if we all have the right to public-domain literature that would enhance society as a whole, even if it means that some choose to use that right to make money. There's just no conflict here.
Because my e-mail server can't handle all that content at once! :)
how the hell is it a monopoly? is MSN messenger just a figment of my imagination?
Look, you don't need to own an entire industry to be a monopoly. The lack of viable alternatives is what defines a monopoly. It's not a difficult concept.
If I want to do instant messenging, I have to use AOL's protocol (one of them, anyway... I happen to use TOC in the client I use) or I can't interoperate with other AIM users, which includes 90% of my co-workers and friends.
oops...
you're right. Still, though, 9/10 are not SQL server, so I stand by my original point.
Now where is that damn undo button?
Yawn... Microsoft makes an inexpensive database. According to the price/performance table, it seems to be really great. On the other hand, if you look at JUST performance numbers, the difference becomes clear. SQL server doesn't even make the list Oh well, I guess you get what you pay for.
Nice idea, but a friend of mine tried this, but his ISP, UC Santa Cruz, doesn't allow anyone to have "open shares" on their computers. They threatened disconnecting him for doing this exact thing.
You're right, I had forgotten that Yahoo wasn't enabled by default. Here's what you do:
1)From the log-in screen, click Plugins
2)Next click Load (lower-left), it should take you to a file-chooser, where libyahoo.so is an option. Click OK to add it (NOTE: do this for any of MSN, ICQ, etc. as well)
3)Ok, now you should be all set. When you add an account, yahoo should be an option.
I've tried some of the other Yahoo! clients people have made. Frankly none of them compares to the "official" client.
I suppose it's offtopic, but gaim is a nice, powerful GPL'd instant messenger client for GTK. It speaks the Yahoo protocol plus about a dozen others including IRC, MSN, ICQ, and of course, AIM. It warns me if I have Yahoo mail, etc. There's a lot of active development on plug-ins for it, too.
And while you're at it, why not just put it up on a good old WebDAV server that you both have access to, and it will appear magically (via Web Folders) in Windows Explorer (or the DAV file system on Linux or Mac OSX).
It's hard to imagine anything easier and more transparent than that.
I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this, but it seems that ZDNet has seen the error of their ways, and posted a note above the poll. It says:
.Net by a factor of three in this poll. By early January, the position had reversed; the results are shown here. An investigation indicated that Microsoft employees used vote-rigging to distort the results. The full story can be found here."
"On 21 December, ZDNet posted a story reporting the preliminary results of this poll, which showed a large majority of respondents who said they planned to deliver applications via Web services by the end of 2002 favoured Java for the job. At the time, Java outranked