Your conversation can be logically reduced to this
But what if X is true
Stop seeing X as true!
Denying the existence of a problem is one of the most common ways to deal with problems.
Indeed, and saying "child X is just plain evil" is one of the most common ways in which such denial manifests itself. It neatly absolves both parent and child of responsibility for their actions or lack thereof. Looking for specific solutions to specific problems, OTOH, is the opposite of denial.
Sadly, that was not a joke. It is mainstream childrearing practice in the United States. (Meanwhile, Americans keep wondering why their society is so violent and fucked up.)
Me, every time I installed Ubuntu, first thing I did was to setup a password for root. So much more confortable to go su than to have to type sudo for every freaking command.
Or you can just type
sudo su -
to get a root shell, even without setting a root password.
Government should not be in the business of making specific technical decisions that are inevitably subject to obsolescence. They should mandate general principles. Mandating the use of open, patent-free formats = good. Mandating the use of an open but specific format (not to mention a contrived mess such as ODF) = bad.
Newspapers in the UK are just as bad. People get accused of something, and before they have gone to trial, their name is mud. Now, alot of the time when they are found innocent, or the paper had a case of mistaken identity, if they even bother to point this out, it's in the tiniest retraction wedged inbetween some columnist and the sports.
That's why in countries like the Netherlands and Sweden, the accused cannot be named in the press. In NL they use their initials to refer to them, in Sweden their age. I don't know if there are any other countries with laws like that, but I imagine there are. Of course, with big and controversial cases, there will be foreign press coverage with full names and people find out anyway through the Internet.
But assuming it's an impossibility because of trade is naive and historically incorrect.
Nobody said anything about impossibility. I do believe being trading partners in a free market system with free movement of goods and labour makes war less likely. I do not think that's naive, especially since that's been historically the case since the beginning of the EU. Note that there was no EU free market in 1940.
I'd probably be hostile, too. IIRC, the backstory with NeoOffice was that they were trying to work with OOo on a native OSX port, and not only did Sun refuse to help, but they basically sabotaged their efforts.
I don't know the history but I'm a bit skeptical. Clashes like these usually have more to do with personalities and egos than anything else, and the NeoOffice website has 'huge big ego' written all over it. Since OOo is software libre, I don't see how it's possible to 'sabotage' a fork except by refusing to cooperate with it. And given that the fork's license is incompatible with the main tree, I can see why they would refuse to cooperate.
Protecting your trademark is not a "loophole". All sorts of projects, whether they're commercial (Redhat) or not (Mozilla), protect their trademarks.
Mozilla's trademark protectiveness is also rather controversial. But neither Mozilla nor any other project that I know of has a clause like this one:
"The moment that an exchange of money is involved, usage of the NeoOffice® trademark is hereby prohibited unless 100% of gross margins on such sales are donated back to NeoOffice.org and Planamesa Software."
So, user groups can't sell CDs with it for a nominal fee and have the proceeds go towards running the club, magazines can't include it on their CDs, etc. That does not seem like Free software to me at all. Not to mention that their policy of restricting distribution of binaries of new releases, even temporarily, is plainly in violation of the license under which Sun published the original OOo code.
And sure, you can strip out all references to the trademark and recompile. Too bad the OOo source tree is so opaque that almost no one is capable of doing that.
OpenOffice.org runs on Mac OS X under X11.
NeoOffice is an independently developed version of OpenOffice.org 2.1 which runs on Mac OS X natively and without the need for X11. I've been using it for years.
Given its heavy use of Java I think the 'native' qualification is debatable. Some aspects are native (e.g. font management), which is certainly a major plus.
Unfortunately, though, this application gives new meaning to the words 'slow' and 'bloated'. The author has also chosen to make its license (GPL) incompatible with OO.o's (LGPL) so that his porting efforts cannot be contributed back to the main project. That makes NeoOffice a very hostile fork. What's more, he is trying (against the terms of the GPL/LGPL) to limit free distribution by using the trademark loophole.
So, I would say that while a port exists, it's both low quality and under bad management, and I welcome this new effort to do it properly.
Lots of companies use Open Source to make a buck in some way, and some of them either mis-represent what is Open, or they don't get it at all. I saw an Oracle representative give a talk on "Free Software from Oracle" in Belfast last year. It turned out that he thought Free Software was software they don't charge for.
Um... in spite of Richard Stallman's rather pathetic attempt to redefine the English language, that is what the term "free software" actually means. You cannot legitimately criticize the Oracle representative for using the English language correctly.
Yes, it is. In fact, the freedom to study and change the source code is the most fundamental freedom in Free software. If you don't have the source code and can't get access to it, the program is as good as proprietary.
I think that's why microsoft is bricking over Linux et al. While Microsoft is being drown in a shitpool of its own making, Open Source is powering ever onward.
On the contrary, if things continue like this, Open Source software will become de facto illegal (if it isn't already). If every obvious software method is patented, Microsoft can simply sue Linux, GNU, OO.o, etc. out of existence, at least in the USA.
For creating the Internet, and for pushing the globalization to enrich the poor of the world to use it.
Americans are always so smug about that, but mass usage of the Internet would have gone nowhere without the WWW, which is a European invention.
What the Americans really created, of course, was not the Internet but ARPANET, its predecessor. The first international ARPANET link (to Norway) was established in 1973. What is nowadays called the Internet, i.e. the huge internetwork based on TCP/IP, didn't actually exist until 1983 when TCP/IP became the only approved internetworking standard. The Internet and its predecessor had been international for ten years by then.
A little less smugness and a little more recognition of the spirit of international cooperation, which is what really created the Internet, would be appropriate.
It's a basic primer on UNIX job control. Whee. Not that it isn't well done or useful to the target audience -- but how is this 'news', never mind 'stuff that matters'?
I mostly am the IT department at a 30 employee company, so I have some experience with these issues from a somewhat different (non-Fortune 1000) perspective.
First, you are confounding personal use of the network (e.g. personal email) with major security risks like people installing their own software. If people are even able to install their own software on the computers under your management, I have no idea why you still have a job -- restricted-rights user accounts exist for a reason. From a security perspective, allowing software installation is dumb. Allowing personal email is not.
That's because the company network exists for the benefit of the people keeping the company running -- people being the essential keyword. Allowing the minimum access rights required for the job and no more is good security policy for software, but it's crap for people. You're creating resentment and a blame-the-IT-department culture, as well as a major incentive for users to get away with whatever they can get away with. This type of policy is known to lower overall productivity, simply because it makes the employees unhappy and cynical.
Where I work, people care about the company and they naturally care about the network as an extension of the company. The company runs Linux Terminal Server Project-based terminals and a few Windows boxes under limited-rights user accounts. Technical measures disallow the installation of any software without it going through me first. But no one cares if people want to send a few emails to friends or check what the weather will be like over the weekend. I treat employees like people, not like security risks. I never get blamed for problems, I get thanked for solving them.
My responsibility is to the security of the network, not the whim of the user.
A good network manager's responsibility is to the user -- period.
Due to politics, OpenOffice.org has exorcised all reference that a perfectly functional, native, and Aqua port of OpenOffice.org exists for the Macintosh.
So learn to use a proper CLI and solve your problem.
Alternatively, popular GUI's (Windows most of all) allow you to control virtually everything with the keyboard.
And for those who really passionately hate the mouse, or can't use it for some other reason, there's something called MouseKeys that you can turn on to move the pointer with the keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, and saying "child X is just plain evil" is one of the most common ways in which such denial manifests itself. It neatly absolves both parent and child of responsibility for their actions or lack thereof. Looking for specific solutions to specific problems, OTOH, is the opposite of denial.
Sadly, that was not a joke. It is mainstream childrearing practice in the United States. (Meanwhile, Americans keep wondering why their society is so violent and fucked up.)
Then physically and mentally abusing your kid will only cause him to become more evil.
So don't.
Instead, stop seeing your child as "just plain evil", and start looking for solutions to his problems.
Or you can just type
to get a root shell, even without setting a root password.Government should not be in the business of making specific technical decisions that are inevitably subject to obsolescence. They should mandate general principles. Mandating the use of open, patent-free formats = good. Mandating the use of an open but specific format (not to mention a contrived mess such as ODF) = bad.
That's why in countries like the Netherlands and Sweden, the accused cannot be named in the press. In NL they use their initials to refer to them, in Sweden their age. I don't know if there are any other countries with laws like that, but I imagine there are. Of course, with big and controversial cases, there will be foreign press coverage with full names and people find out anyway through the Internet.
Nobody said anything about impossibility. I do believe being trading partners in a free market system with free movement of goods and labour makes war less likely. I do not think that's naive, especially since that's been historically the case since the beginning of the EU. Note that there was no EU free market in 1940.
Wow, an implied Godwin invocation, and so soon.
Care to explain how WW2 was in Germany's interests? I don't think they're about to repeat that particilar mistake in the next few centuries or so.
By being an economic organization. It's not in any country's interest to wage war with its closest trade partners.
I don't know the history but I'm a bit skeptical. Clashes like these usually have more to do with personalities and egos than anything else, and the NeoOffice website has 'huge big ego' written all over it. Since OOo is software libre, I don't see how it's possible to 'sabotage' a fork except by refusing to cooperate with it. And given that the fork's license is incompatible with the main tree, I can see why they would refuse to cooperate.
Mozilla's trademark protectiveness is also rather controversial. But neither Mozilla nor any other project that I know of has a clause like this one:
"The moment that an exchange of money is involved, usage of the NeoOffice® trademark is hereby prohibited unless 100% of gross margins on such sales are donated back to NeoOffice.org and Planamesa Software."
So, user groups can't sell CDs with it for a nominal fee and have the proceeds go towards running the club, magazines can't include it on their CDs, etc. That does not seem like Free software to me at all. Not to mention that their policy of restricting distribution of binaries of new releases, even temporarily, is plainly in violation of the license under which Sun published the original OOo code.
And sure, you can strip out all references to the trademark and recompile. Too bad the OOo source tree is so opaque that almost no one is capable of doing that.
Given its heavy use of Java I think the 'native' qualification is debatable. Some aspects are native (e.g. font management), which is certainly a major plus.
Unfortunately, though, this application gives new meaning to the words 'slow' and 'bloated'. The author has also chosen to make its license (GPL) incompatible with OO.o's (LGPL) so that his porting efforts cannot be contributed back to the main project. That makes NeoOffice a very hostile fork. What's more, he is trying (against the terms of the GPL/LGPL) to limit free distribution by using the trademark loophole.
So, I would say that while a port exists, it's both low quality and under bad management, and I welcome this new effort to do it properly.
...and which therefore have fundamentally parasitic business models and deserve to disappear, every last one of them.
Um... in spite of Richard Stallman's rather pathetic attempt to redefine the English language, that is what the term "free software" actually means. You cannot legitimately criticize the Oracle representative for using the English language correctly.
Yes, it is. In fact, the freedom to study and change the source code is the most fundamental freedom in Free software. If you don't have the source code and can't get access to it, the program is as good as proprietary.
Yeah. It'll route around China just fine.
On the contrary, if things continue like this, Open Source software will become de facto illegal (if it isn't already). If every obvious software method is patented, Microsoft can simply sue Linux, GNU, OO.o, etc. out of existence, at least in the USA.
Americans are always so smug about that, but mass usage of the Internet would have gone nowhere without the WWW, which is a European invention.
What the Americans really created, of course, was not the Internet but ARPANET, its predecessor. The first international ARPANET link (to Norway) was established in 1973. What is nowadays called the Internet, i.e. the huge internetwork based on TCP/IP, didn't actually exist until 1983 when TCP/IP became the only approved internetworking standard. The Internet and its predecessor had been international for ten years by then.
A little less smugness and a little more recognition of the spirit of international cooperation, which is what really created the Internet, would be appropriate.
American fundamentalism about "property", especially property of corporations, is just one reason why I'm mighty glad I don't have to live there.
It's a basic primer on UNIX job control. Whee. Not that it isn't well done or useful to the target audience -- but how is this 'news', never mind 'stuff that matters'?
I mostly am the IT department at a 30 employee company, so I have some experience with these issues from a somewhat different (non-Fortune 1000) perspective.
First, you are confounding personal use of the network (e.g. personal email) with major security risks like people installing their own software. If people are even able to install their own software on the computers under your management, I have no idea why you still have a job -- restricted-rights user accounts exist for a reason. From a security perspective, allowing software installation is dumb. Allowing personal email is not.
That's because the company network exists for the benefit of the people keeping the company running -- people being the essential keyword. Allowing the minimum access rights required for the job and no more is good security policy for software, but it's crap for people. You're creating resentment and a blame-the-IT-department culture, as well as a major incentive for users to get away with whatever they can get away with. This type of policy is known to lower overall productivity, simply because it makes the employees unhappy and cynical.
Where I work, people care about the company and they naturally care about the network as an extension of the company. The company runs Linux Terminal Server Project-based terminals and a few Windows boxes under limited-rights user accounts. Technical measures disallow the installation of any software without it going through me first. But no one cares if people want to send a few emails to friends or check what the weather will be like over the weekend. I treat employees like people, not like security risks. I never get blamed for problems, I get thanked for solving them.
A good network manager's responsibility is to the user -- period.
So learn to use a proper CLI and solve your problem.
Alternatively, popular GUI's (Windows most of all) allow you to control virtually everything with the keyboard.
And for those who really passionately hate the mouse, or can't use it for some other reason, there's something called MouseKeys that you can turn on to move the pointer with the keyboard.
Apple will probably be the first to make one. It seems like just the kind of thing they would have loved to come up with first.
(Disclaimer: I've been using and loving Macs since 1987)
Which they're not.
Which you've got.
So where is the problem?
Oh, I see: another slashdork with a pathological sense of entitlement.