The trouble with your over-simplified idea of not buying from them, is that it's pretty hard to find an ethical corporation, due to the fact that ethics are expensive and impact the bottom line. I have to eat and I don't have the time to grow my own food, so I have to deal with the exploitative supermarkets that have driven any alternatives away a long time ago. Corporate misbehaviour is a serious issue and sadly the only organisation powerful enough to keep them in check, the government, is wholly owned by corps. This applies to my shitty little island as well as the US.
You could apply that argument anywhere though. Why buy Windows when Linux is free, why buy Office when StarOffice is free. I'd buy Opera if it was better than what's currently available, which on Linux it isn't really, although it's getting there.
Yawn, yet another innacurate statement. The Mozilla I'm using doesn't have a mail client. It's a separate plugin package as you will be able to see if you go here. I also wish people would keep up to date with releases before whinging. Yes 6.0 was a mess, but 6.01 isn't and neither is Mozilla 0.7 and 0.8, so use them instead.
I think he meant the people who actually decided to release the mess that is 6.0. Having said that 6.01 isn't too bad, so I reckon 6.1 will be spot on (at long, long last).
Yes sharing ideas with everyone else is bad. Like that noted Marxist Sir Isaac Newton. He should have patented gravity and charged everyone. Or that pinko commie Albert Einstein.
Sharing with the community is standard scientific practice as it advances the whole area. Why should computer science be anydifferent?
Just as an aside, if the specs for the PC were closed do you think that the market would be anything like as big as it is?
What do you think IBM will have to say about Microsoft trying to make their $1.3BN investment irrelevant. Microsoft are too late to try legislative action, their most powerful enemies support Linux. I mean, do you think Scott McNealy will just say 'yes sir Mr Bill sir' when ordered to take down OpenOffice?
That's assuming that the only job you could ever get in IT was writing commercial software. Which is not the case. Also if there is no money to be made in free software why are the major players in the IT industry (except Microsoft) all committing in some way to OSS. Do you think Telia got their S390 + Linux expertise for free? It is bad for Microsoft, no doubt about it but bad for the sector - pull the other one.
The point is though that MS would have to buy every single government in the world. They may be able to, but I think the shareholders might have something to say about that. Not to mention the fact that Sun, HP and IBM are not exactly short of money and aren't going to stand idly buy and let MS tell them what to do with the software they spent significant R&D dollars on.
If the international community agrees on sanctions then western countries tend to be pretty good at adhering to them (e.g. Iraq). But there are to be no sanctions against China, even though the Chinese government is just as odious as Saddam Hussein. You pride yourself on your anti-China paraphernalia, then attempt to justify the west's propping up of the regime and you accuse leftists of hypocrisy,
I can't refer you to a page that shows women being attacked on an anti-racist march by right-wing thugs, although I was there and also had to fend them off as well, with a greater degree of success since I'm a 15 stone martial artist.
The article you refer to is very interesting and the actions of the students in vandalising the newspaper is nothing short of disgraceful, and the water buffalo incident is obviously ludicrous. These are not true leftists but people who are acutely sensitive to racism, real or imagined.
My definition of workers' rights are simple:
not being forced to work over 45 hours a week unless you want to;
being able to work in a safe environment without fear of injury where the onus is on the staff and the managers to co-operate on keeping the plant safe;
management should not have the right to arbitrarily dismiss 'troublesome' employees;
No-one under the age of 16 should be employed in dangerous conditions;
workers should have the right to join a union.
Why shouldn't they have these rights? Why should they have to fight for rights that Nike et al would have no problem providing? There is no reason whatsoever, apart from that it would impact the bottom line. Just because the governments of Thailand or China are corrupt doesn't mean a thing - workers' rights can and should be provided. Saying that they'd be worse off without a job is no excuse for virtual slave labour - in fact that's the same specious argument used by the mill owners against providing rights to British workers in the past.
Finally whether some leftists are stupid and lazy is irrelevant. I doubt the morons that attacked the march I was on had first-class honours degrees either, or anything but the most basic education.
But without mpeg2dec and ac3dec from the Livid project, Xine wouldn't exist. Xine also came along at a time when XFree86 started supporting hardware acceleration, giving them an excellent head start. Don't knock Livid, they've done a brilliant job despite the best efforts of the MPAA and the (so far) vapour from Intervideo. I've got to give Videolan a go though, sounds interesting.
Mandrake 7.0 was superb, Mandrake 7.1 was Mandrake's attempt at Windows 98:-) and Mandrake 7.2 is again superb. I'm looking forward to 7.3 with interest.
You download all the packages. rpm -Uvh kde*rpm
kdesupport needs OpenSSL. Okay, go and fetch that from rpmfind.net. Try again. kdelibs needs libmng etc etc. RPM only informs you of the dependencies, it doesn't resolve them. You also need to install in this order:
kdesupport, kdelibs, kdebase, then the rest. KDE 1 came with a very nice little install script, but that wouldn't work now that KDE is installed by default in different places by different distros (it wasn't in RedHat 5.2 when I first discovered KDE). The Ximian installer is nice, but according to a poster above, it force-installs everything, which has potentially disastrous results for your desktop, since it's not just GNOME rpms you need but stuff like libxml. apt-get sounds great, but Debian itself is for l33t3r h4x0rs than me.
Yes, as long as you use XFree86 4.0.2 which has an Xvideo driver for the Rage 128 chipsets. Otherwise it's comparable to a turtle swimming through treacle (at least on my 'piddly' PIII 500)
You called me stupid and lazy which is nothing more than an insult. You then proceed to take issue with a typo as if it proves your point. You then imply that I'm a racist, even though leftist politics are totally against this. People in the Far East have a right to work in the safe conditions with the same employment rights as those enjoyed by Western factory workers. This is not what they get.
As for arms sales to China, 'someone else will do it if we don't' is the usual justification for something unjustifiable. The Chinese is one of the most repressive around and yet instead of trying to change this through subtle application of economic pressure, it's a free-for-all and to hell with the Tibetans and those who were massacred in Tiananamen Square (and if that's spelled wrong so what). To paraphrase your earlier argument, don't people with brown skins and slanty eyes have a right not to be brutally murdered with western-made weapons.
Finally, I've seen many more leftists harassed for expressing their views than rightists. I've seen racist thugs attack a peaceful demonstration against racism which is a bit nastier than mere heckling.
I have total contempt for the political right who think that if you're poor, sick, disabled or otherwise disadvantaged then tough luck.
PC has not gone too far. When I was at school 15 years ago racist abuse was the norm. Now anyone who makes a racist comment is immediately slapped down because it's totally unacceptable and quite right too. This isn't extremism, it's common decency. I don't see what the second law of thermodynamics has to do with politics at all, it's merely physics and would exist whether the human race did or not.
(And real education includes learning about mathematics, chemistry, physics, economics and all that "hard stuff" which is obviously a foreign language to so many leftists. They'd prefer to label it "bourgeois" or "not part of their way of knowing" and ignore it.)
Yes, all leftists are stupid and lazy. Way to make an argument. Just because we don't fall for the bull that money is the only thing that matters in life.
I don't have anything against profits and neither do most leftists, what we object to is profits before anything else. Such as Nike transferring it's manufacturing to Far-Eastern sweatshops, or McDonnell-Douglas selling arms to the Chinese that are then used in the oppression of it's people.
Anyway leftists are much more respectful of people's rights to behave. You don't hear left-wing politicians denouncing homosexuals for example. I, for one, couldn't care less what anyone else does, so long as they don't hurt or otherwise abuse someone else.
I wish Americans would stop associating the left wing with totalitarian communism. It's just as ludicrous as comparing George W Bush with Hitler.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble with your over-simplified idea of not buying from them, is that it's pretty hard to find an ethical corporation, due to the fact that ethics are expensive and impact the bottom line. I have to eat and I don't have the time to grow my own food, so I have to deal with the exploitative supermarkets that have driven any alternatives away a long time ago. Corporate misbehaviour is a serious issue and sadly the only organisation powerful enough to keep them in check, the government, is wholly owned by corps. This applies to my shitty little island as well as the US.
I know this is off-topic, but the Nazis never got more than 36% of the vote in Germany, they rose to power through clever politicking.
Works fine for me. What problems are you having?
You could apply that argument anywhere though. Why buy Windows when Linux is free, why buy Office when StarOffice is free. I'd buy Opera if it was better than what's currently available, which on Linux it isn't really, although it's getting there.
Yawn, yet another innacurate statement. The Mozilla I'm using doesn't have a mail client. It's a separate plugin package as you will be able to see if you go here. I also wish people would keep up to date with releases before whinging. Yes 6.0 was a mess, but 6.01 isn't and neither is Mozilla 0.7 and 0.8, so use them instead.
I think he meant the people who actually decided to release the mess that is 6.0. Having said that 6.01 isn't too bad, so I reckon 6.1 will be spot on (at long, long last).
Yes sharing ideas with everyone else is bad. Like that noted Marxist Sir Isaac Newton. He should have patented gravity and charged everyone. Or that pinko commie Albert Einstein.
Sharing with the community is standard scientific practice as it advances the whole area. Why should computer science be anydifferent?
Just as an aside, if the specs for the PC were closed do you think that the market would be anything like as big as it is?
What do you think IBM will have to say about Microsoft trying to make their $1.3BN investment irrelevant. Microsoft are too late to try legislative action, their most powerful enemies support Linux. I mean, do you think Scott McNealy will just say 'yes sir Mr Bill sir' when ordered to take down OpenOffice?
That's assuming that the only job you could ever get in IT was writing commercial software. Which is not the case. Also if there is no money to be made in free software why are the major players in the IT industry (except Microsoft) all committing in some way to OSS. Do you think Telia got their S390 + Linux expertise for free? It is bad for Microsoft, no doubt about it but bad for the sector - pull the other one.
The point is though that MS would have to buy every single government in the world. They may be able to, but I think the shareholders might have something to say about that. Not to mention the fact that Sun, HP and IBM are not exactly short of money and aren't going to stand idly buy and let MS tell them what to do with the software they spent significant R&D dollars on.
Apache for one, sendmaill for another. I'll ask you the same. Show me one piece of software that Microsoft didn't buy or copy from someone else.
If the international community agrees on sanctions then western countries tend to be pretty good at adhering to them (e.g. Iraq). But there are to be no sanctions against China, even though the Chinese government is just as odious as Saddam Hussein. You pride yourself on your anti-China paraphernalia, then attempt to justify the west's propping up of the regime and you accuse leftists of hypocrisy,
I can't refer you to a page that shows women being attacked on an anti-racist march by right-wing thugs, although I was there and also had to fend them off as well, with a greater degree of success since I'm a 15 stone martial artist.
The article you refer to is very interesting and the actions of the students in vandalising the newspaper is nothing short of disgraceful, and the water buffalo incident is obviously ludicrous. These are not true leftists but people who are acutely sensitive to racism, real or imagined.
My definition of workers' rights are simple:
not being forced to work over 45 hours a week unless you want to;
being able to work in a safe environment without fear of injury where the onus is on the staff and the managers to co-operate on keeping the plant safe;
management should not have the right to arbitrarily dismiss 'troublesome' employees;
No-one under the age of 16 should be employed in dangerous conditions;
workers should have the right to join a union.
Why shouldn't they have these rights? Why should they have to fight for rights that Nike et al would have no problem providing? There is no reason whatsoever, apart from that it would impact the bottom line. Just because the governments of Thailand or China are corrupt doesn't mean a thing - workers' rights can and should be provided. Saying that they'd be worse off without a job is no excuse for virtual slave labour - in fact that's the same specious argument used by the mill owners against providing rights to British workers in the past.
Finally whether some leftists are stupid and lazy is irrelevant. I doubt the morons that attacked the march I was on had first-class honours degrees either, or anything but the most basic education.
It does use some of the chipset functionality though as the change from 4.01 to 4.02 upped my frame rate in OMS from 14 to 23.
But without mpeg2dec and ac3dec from the Livid project, Xine wouldn't exist. Xine also came along at a time when XFree86 started supporting hardware acceleration, giving them an excellent head start. Don't knock Livid, they've done a brilliant job despite the best efforts of the MPAA and the (so far) vapour from Intervideo. I've got to give Videolan a go though, sounds interesting.
You mean you have to type commands? What a crazy idea. Next you'll be telling me Microsoft are a monopoly.
Mandrake 7.0 was superb, Mandrake 7.1 was Mandrake's attempt at Windows 98 :-) and Mandrake 7.2 is again superb. I'm looking forward to 7.3 with interest.
You download all the packages. rpm -Uvh kde*rpm
kdesupport needs OpenSSL. Okay, go and fetch that from rpmfind.net. Try again. kdelibs needs libmng etc etc. RPM only informs you of the dependencies, it doesn't resolve them. You also need to install in this order:
kdesupport, kdelibs, kdebase, then the rest. KDE 1 came with a very nice little install script, but that wouldn't work now that KDE is installed by default in different places by different distros (it wasn't in RedHat 5.2 when I first discovered KDE). The Ximian installer is nice, but according to a poster above, it force-installs everything, which has potentially disastrous results for your desktop, since it's not just GNOME rpms you need but stuff like libxml. apt-get sounds great, but Debian itself is for l33t3r h4x0rs than me.
VNC
allows you to do this. It's similar to PCAnywhere but is platform-independent.
I know I'm going to be eaten alive by gurus here, but why would you need write access to a read-only device?
Yes, as long as you use XFree86 4.0.2 which has an Xvideo driver for the Rage 128 chipsets. Otherwise it's comparable to a turtle swimming through treacle (at least on my 'piddly' PIII 500)
And then Slashdot makes sure that most people can't reach the site.
You called me stupid and lazy which is nothing more than an insult. You then proceed to take issue with a typo as if it proves your point. You then imply that I'm a racist, even though leftist politics are totally against this. People in the Far East have a right to work in the safe conditions with the same employment rights as those enjoyed by Western factory workers. This is not what they get.
As for arms sales to China, 'someone else will do it if we don't' is the usual justification for something unjustifiable. The Chinese is one of the most repressive around and yet instead of trying to change this through subtle application of economic pressure, it's a free-for-all and to hell with the Tibetans and those who were massacred in Tiananamen Square (and if that's spelled wrong so what). To paraphrase your earlier argument, don't people with brown skins and slanty eyes have a right not to be brutally murdered with western-made weapons.
Finally, I've seen many more leftists harassed for expressing their views than rightists. I've seen racist thugs attack a peaceful demonstration against racism which is a bit nastier than mere heckling.
I have total contempt for the political right who think that if you're poor, sick, disabled or otherwise disadvantaged then tough luck.
PC has not gone too far. When I was at school 15 years ago racist abuse was the norm. Now anyone who makes a racist comment is immediately slapped down because it's totally unacceptable and quite right too. This isn't extremism, it's common decency. I don't see what the second law of thermodynamics has to do with politics at all, it's merely physics and would exist whether the human race did or not.
How much is this royalty and where's the URL to prove it?
Isn't OpenBSD a fork of NetBSD, created when Theo fell out with the other developers.
(And real education includes learning about mathematics, chemistry, physics, economics and all that "hard stuff" which is obviously a foreign language to so many leftists. They'd prefer to label it "bourgeois" or "not part of their way of knowing" and ignore it.)
Yes, all leftists are stupid and lazy. Way to make an argument. Just because we don't fall for the bull that money is the only thing that matters in life.
I don't have anything against profits and neither do most leftists, what we object to is profits before anything else. Such as Nike transferring it's manufacturing to Far-Eastern sweatshops, or McDonnell-Douglas selling arms to the Chinese that are then used in the oppression of it's people.
Anyway leftists are much more respectful of people's rights to behave. You don't hear left-wing politicians denouncing homosexuals for example. I, for one, couldn't care less what anyone else does, so long as they don't hurt or otherwise abuse someone else.
I wish Americans would stop associating the left wing with totalitarian communism. It's just as ludicrous as comparing George W Bush with Hitler.