perhaps one could say they adhered to the written standard but not the standard implementation, that every other odf project follows. If every implementation resolves ambiguities in the spec in the same way, that universal implementation effectively becomes part of the "standard" (loosely taken). Compliance with standards in document formats isn't about just following the letter, its about interoperability. Apparently all those inferior amateur open source projects could figure out how to achieve interoperability despite the incomplete standard, but MS couldn't.
why 'and/or'? were you concerned the op may have had both sexes at once? I swear the indiscriminate use of 'and/or' when 'and' or 'or' is meant is destroying english speakers' comprehension of logic. now get the fuck off my lawn.
Possibly OT, but when I installed a little outdoor DTV antenna the other day, I was amazed by how many stations I got. I'm wondering: as stations start taking advantage of the extra stations (you know, running more programs rather than running HD and SD stations with the same programming plus a weather channel) will large numbers of casual TV users decide the monthly cable fee isn't worth it?
Not a flame but Kubuntu is terribly slow, in my experience. I tried it and moved to openSuse 11.1; I got a much better experience, even on cheap hw (1.7Ghz, 1Gb, intel graphics). I've heard it speculated that KDE is not a terribly high priority for Canonical, whereas the reverse is true with Suse. Don't know whether its true, but my experience definitely jibs with it.
It's worse than that:
I plugged the numbers into Oo.org calc, and got a trendline: f(x) = 8.16*1.01^x where x is time in months (Starting 0 = june 08) and y is linux marketshare in 10ths of a percent.
it will reach 2% about 6 1/2 years from now).
it will hit 10% around 20 years form now
it will hit 34% in about 30 years
it will pass 50% in about 33 1/2 years
it will have 100% penetration in just under 40 years
So depending on how you define "year of the linux desktop" you know without a doubt when it will come.
So does FexEx, UPS, or DHL deliver a document from any mailbox to anywhere in the country for 43 cents in a couple of days? You have to take then for what they are. They aren't (primarily) a parcel service. They aren't an overnight courier. They are a mail service. And for that they do a pretty good job.
if you compare 2mbps to 28.8kbps (probably a more realistic number, since lots of the people forced to use dial up are unable to get DSL because the copper is bad) the ratio comes out nearer to 70x faster (overall).
I think the point of the people saying "guns" is that not only are they acceptable, they are the obvious solution. Using a gun is not rocket science. And it isn't like they would be used on a daily basis, they would be an emergency measure to protect the ship from attack. This goes for the potential accidents. Keep the guns in a locked cabinet, give the captain and second in command the combination, and make sure they only get brought out for cleaning or when the ship is being attacked. Can accidents happen? Is there some risk? Yes. But in the situation in which they would actually be used there is a already a big risk to life and property. I for one would much rather take my chances with my friend having a gun, than with letting armed enemies on board. If it were my cargo on board I'd also rather take a chance with sailor accidentally putting a bullet in a container than with the ship being taken by pirates. No one is advocating having sailors carry loaded sidearms 24/7. They are advocating having arms on board so they sailors can, at the captains discretion, effectively defend themselves and the ship if they are attacked.
I was actually stunned when all this piracy stuff hit the news. I always assumed these ships had a gun cabinet on board, precisely because when you are out there you can't depend on the coast guard or navy to get to you in time, and you have to be able to take care of yourself. And you don't need marines to defend a ship from a half dozen pirates in a dingy. We aren't talking about full out naval battles. I'd be willing to bet that the pirate would quickly find something better to do with their time if every ship they approach returned fire, even if the fire was poorly placed. Just knowing that a couple guys on the deck are training on you while you try to board would seem like a pretty good reason to rethink the whole business model. (Much the same way as having guns in homes can be a big deterrent to robbery. The low hanging fruit stops looking so appealing if you are risking your life to pick it.)
even worse than those gaping security holes for linux that assume the attacker has root access. "A cracker with physical access to a machine can take control of the computer during boot. News at 11."
It is more that the monks lost control of what the general public was able to read. Suddenly is was no longer possible for the monks to censor religious or political incorrect ideas.
Perhaps it's nitpicking, but this wasn't censorship. It was just the situation: people don't use dozens of sheepskins and months of labor to copy something they don't think is worth reading. When books cost the equivalent of $30,000 only good books got spread around (where "good" is decided by those funding their production). But the monks didn't have a monopoly let alone government power to censor; there were other sources of books (depending on the period and place) viz., professional copyists. And there was no copyright, so if anyone with money thought something was worth spreading or preserving it could be (which was awefully enlightend of them I might add).
How long until they start asking for IPs of people who searched for copyright infringing material?
If they did have the audacity to request it, Google would tell them to shove it. Google would just say, and any reasonable court would agree, that they have no reasonable way to know what anyone was actually searching for. Just because I search for the string "Dark Knight" doesn't mean I am attempting to violate copyright by downloading the movie, I might actually be considering going to it and looking for reviews, or show times, or maybe I am just looking for a blog called "dark knight" or an article on a little known mediaeval warrior or . ... At least in the US, our courts, for all their shortcomings, maintain a pretense of not warranting fishing expeditions.
How long until they ask Google to only list 'authorized' links for copyrighted search terms?
Again, if they were retarded enough to bother, Google would tell them where to go. What possible reason would Google have to comply? What law could possibly be interpreted to compel them to honor the request? (If this post was meant to satirize alarmists I'm truly sorry.)
No argument can say that that is true from the axioms of logic.
Have you taken a course in logic? You can never get content from the axioms of logic alone. It doesn't just apply to ethics. Try proving any of rules of physics from the axioms of logic.
Any social code of ethics is most likely derived from a leap of faith, and so should not be respected
This is such sweeping generalization I don't know where to start. Do you really deny that we have a sort of native sense of wrong? Is a five year old's sense of being wronged when a bully pushes him around, calls him names, and takes his lunch money based on a "leap of faith"?
Aside from the other good points posted in reply to this: More users equals more developers equals a more and better software. Obviously the typical ex-windows user isn't going to immediately start feeding patches to the kernel devs, but in time some percent of them will file a bug report. Eventually some of those may end up answering questions on support forums. And in time, some of them will end up being curious budding programmers who do eventually end up elbow deep in opensource software projects. There is a sort of marginal contribution per user.
While I like the start and finish of your post, I have to disagree with the middle:
There are some apps from 2 decades ago that are binary-compatible and can run on a modern Windows box. Can the same be said for Linux or Mac?
1) MS's unwillingness to break backwards compatibility is a major source of problems (we can't fix that bug or that security hole because it will break too many apps). 2) Binary compatibility doesn't (generally) matter in an open source world because if the program was any good someone has compiled it to the current platform (assuming you can't do it yourself) and the port is available for free. The two actually go together. Part of the reason FOSS people push "free as in freedom" is that it means the whole system can be fixed: When you aren't working around fixed binary blobs, you don't get stuck using/supporting something that is insecure if the vendor won't release a fixed version.
It isn't the tiers, it's the prices that go with them. Tech typically gets cheaper as it's around longer in a Moore's law sort of way. I know Moore's law doesn't apply directly, but for a better example, think of long distance charges: when it first came out a long distance call was a big deal, but the tech got better and now unlimited long distance is cheap. Ditto with cell plans. With internet it's often going the other way, less for more. And this is largely because we don't have competition and we don't have regulation.
Not trying to flame, but honestly who cares how much water flows through a data center? Is the water having toxic waste added? Is the water being destroyed so it is creating a drought in the area? Are thousands of gallons an hour of boiling water being pumped back into the local stream and changing the ecology? It seems to me that most uses of water are pretty benign, it gets used for some purpose and eventually it all goes back into wild where it naturally get recycled back into the local watertable. Is there any environmentalist out there who can enlighten me on why the water "consumption" of a data center (or any other major plant) is an issue?
Slashdot Mirror
What about Perl? Seems a lot more cultish (in a good way) to me than Ubuntu or RoR.
Or Meno's article.
perhaps one could say they adhered to the written standard but not the standard implementation, that every other odf project follows.
If every implementation resolves ambiguities in the spec in the same way, that universal implementation effectively becomes part of the "standard" (loosely taken).
Compliance with standards in document formats isn't about just following the letter, its about interoperability. Apparently all those inferior amateur open source projects could figure out how to achieve interoperability despite the incomplete standard, but MS couldn't.
why 'and/or'? were you concerned the op may have had both sexes at once?
I swear the indiscriminate use of 'and/or' when 'and' or 'or' is meant is destroying english speakers' comprehension of logic.
now get the fuck off my lawn.
Possibly OT, but when I installed a little outdoor DTV antenna the other day, I was amazed by how many stations I got. I'm wondering: as stations start taking advantage of the extra stations (you know, running more programs rather than running HD and SD stations with the same programming plus a weather channel) will large numbers of casual TV users decide the monthly cable fee isn't worth it?
Not a flame but Kubuntu is terribly slow, in my experience. I tried it and moved to openSuse 11.1; I got a much better experience, even on cheap hw (1.7Ghz, 1Gb, intel graphics).
I've heard it speculated that KDE is not a terribly high priority for Canonical, whereas the reverse is true with Suse. Don't know whether its true, but my experience definitely jibs with it.
When will it have a 200% market share?
just over 45 years from now.
And what will have happened to the world of computers to make such unlikely statistics possible?
Donno. But it will have to have been cool.
Extrapolations like that tend to break down after a while;
WINDOWZ FANBOI! Challenging the maths just because they show that linux is going to kick windoeZ' butt!
So depending on how you define "year of the linux desktop" you know without a doubt when it will come.
So does FexEx, UPS, or DHL deliver a document from any mailbox to anywhere in the country for 43 cents in a couple of days?
You have to take then for what they are. They aren't (primarily) a parcel service. They aren't an overnight courier. They are a mail service. And for that they do a pretty good job.
if you compare 2mbps to 28.8kbps (probably a more realistic number, since lots of the people forced to use dial up are unable to get DSL because the copper is bad) the ratio comes out nearer to 70x faster (overall).
I think the point of the people saying "guns" is that not only are they acceptable, they are the obvious solution. Using a gun is not rocket science. And it isn't like they would be used on a daily basis, they would be an emergency measure to protect the ship from attack. This goes for the potential accidents. Keep the guns in a locked cabinet, give the captain and second in command the combination, and make sure they only get brought out for cleaning or when the ship is being attacked. Can accidents happen? Is there some risk? Yes. But in the situation in which they would actually be used there is a already a big risk to life and property. I for one would much rather take my chances with my friend having a gun, than with letting armed enemies on board. If it were my cargo on board I'd also rather take a chance with sailor accidentally putting a bullet in a container than with the ship being taken by pirates. No one is advocating having sailors carry loaded sidearms 24/7. They are advocating having arms on board so they sailors can, at the captains discretion, effectively defend themselves and the ship if they are attacked.
I was actually stunned when all this piracy stuff hit the news. I always assumed these ships had a gun cabinet on board, precisely because when you are out there you can't depend on the coast guard or navy to get to you in time, and you have to be able to take care of yourself.
And you don't need marines to defend a ship from a half dozen pirates in a dingy. We aren't talking about full out naval battles. I'd be willing to bet that the pirate would quickly find something better to do with their time if every ship they approach returned fire, even if the fire was poorly placed. Just knowing that a couple guys on the deck are training on you while you try to board would seem like a pretty good reason to rethink the whole business model. (Much the same way as having guns in homes can be a big deterrent to robbery. The low hanging fruit stops looking so appealing if you are risking your life to pick it.)
even worse than those gaping security holes for linux that assume the attacker has root access.
"A cracker with physical access to a machine can take control of the computer during boot. News at 11."
Almost all come with that retarded GNU license (which means you can't use it commercially)
What do you mean? The GPL explicitly allows for commercial use or sale.
Yeah, try switch from ubuntu to something like Sidux (xfce version) and see how much you save at idle.
yup, homemade pr0n can be a bitch of an embarrassment in those situations ; )
crap through a goose
It is more that the monks lost control of what the general public was able to read. Suddenly is was no longer possible for the monks to censor religious or political incorrect ideas.
Perhaps it's nitpicking, but this wasn't censorship. It was just the situation: people don't use dozens of sheepskins and months of labor to copy something they don't think is worth reading. When books cost the equivalent of $30,000 only good books got spread around (where "good" is decided by those funding their production).
But the monks didn't have a monopoly let alone government power to censor; there were other sources of books (depending on the period and place) viz., professional copyists. And there was no copyright, so if anyone with money thought something was worth spreading or preserving it could be (which was awefully enlightend of them I might add).
This reminds me of something I read a couple years back, about some project to produce ethanol that was subsidized by the Feds. Someone went back and did the numbers and it turned out, not only was it not economically sustainable without the subsidy, it was actually using more fuel then it was producing. (I found a link that seems to reference the same study: Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.)
Same situation, the subsidy was masking the complete inefficiency of the project.
How long until they start asking for IPs of people who searched for copyright infringing material?
If they did have the audacity to request it, Google would tell them to shove it. Google would just say, and any reasonable court would agree, that they have no reasonable way to know what anyone was actually searching for. Just because I search for the string "Dark Knight" doesn't mean I am attempting to violate copyright by downloading the movie, I might actually be considering going to it and looking for reviews, or show times, or maybe I am just looking for a blog called "dark knight" or an article on a little known mediaeval warrior or . . .. At least in the US, our courts, for all their shortcomings, maintain a pretense of not warranting fishing expeditions.
How long until they ask Google to only list 'authorized' links for copyrighted search terms?
Again, if they were retarded enough to bother, Google would tell them where to go. What possible reason would Google have to comply? What law could possibly be interpreted to compel them to honor the request?
(If this post was meant to satirize alarmists I'm truly sorry.)
No argument can say that that is true from the axioms of logic.
Have you taken a course in logic? You can never get content from the axioms of logic alone. It doesn't just apply to ethics. Try proving any of rules of physics from the axioms of logic.
Any social code of ethics is most likely derived from a leap of faith, and so should not be respected
This is such sweeping generalization I don't know where to start. Do you really deny that we have a sort of native sense of wrong? Is a five year old's sense of being wronged when a bully pushes him around, calls him names, and takes his lunch money based on a "leap of faith"?
Aside from the other good points posted in reply to this:
More users equals more developers equals a more and better software.
Obviously the typical ex-windows user isn't going to immediately start feeding patches to the kernel devs, but in time some percent of them will file a bug report. Eventually some of those may end up answering questions on support forums. And in time, some of them will end up being curious budding programmers who do eventually end up elbow deep in opensource software projects.
There is a sort of marginal contribution per user.
There are some apps from 2 decades ago that are binary-compatible and can run on a modern Windows box. Can the same be said for Linux or Mac?
1) MS's unwillingness to break backwards compatibility is a major source of problems (we can't fix that bug or that security hole because it will break too many apps).
2) Binary compatibility doesn't (generally) matter in an open source world because if the program was any good someone has compiled it to the current platform (assuming you can't do it yourself) and the port is available for free.
The two actually go together. Part of the reason FOSS people push "free as in freedom" is that it means the whole system can be fixed: When you aren't working around fixed binary blobs, you don't get stuck using/supporting something that is insecure if the vendor won't release a fixed version.
It isn't the tiers, it's the prices that go with them. Tech typically gets cheaper as it's around longer in a Moore's law sort of way. I know Moore's law doesn't apply directly, but for a better example, think of long distance charges: when it first came out a long distance call was a big deal, but the tech got better and now unlimited long distance is cheap. Ditto with cell plans. With internet it's often going the other way, less for more. And this is largely because we don't have competition and we don't have regulation.
Not trying to flame, but honestly who cares how much water flows through a data center? Is the water having toxic waste added? Is the water being destroyed so it is creating a drought in the area? Are thousands of gallons an hour of boiling water being pumped back into the local stream and changing the ecology?
It seems to me that most uses of water are pretty benign, it gets used for some purpose and eventually it all goes back into wild where it naturally get recycled back into the local watertable. Is there any environmentalist out there who can enlighten me on why the water "consumption" of a data center (or any other major plant) is an issue?