...but there's a hell of a lot of a way to go. I have side by side a Mandrake 9.2 box (still a 2.4.x kernel) and a Mac running OS X 10.3.3 so I'm constantly seeing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I can't see using the Mac as a server (though it does have apache and postfix), and I can't see using the linux box as a desktop. I can't think of one area in which the linux box is superior to the Mac for desktop use (leaving licensing aside; I'm no free software nazi). I fire up yon KDE (slightly less offensive than Gnome to me) and shake my head and the crudity and the awkwardness. My overall impression is it's the worst part of imitating Windows without any of the "I'm going to make using this easier for you" benefits it gives. One of the reasons why the linux kernel is so good compared to everything else is there's someone (with good judgment) who can and will say "that's stupid, we're not going to do that." The KDE and Gnome teams need to do the same thing, as do the CUPS team, etc, etc, etc.
You gotta play to your strengths and while this is a long way from KDE 1.0 that I first used with MKLinux 7 years ago, there sure hasn't been 7 years of evolution from the user end (yeah, I know under the hood is wayyy changed). Maybe 1 year done 7 times....
Anyway, the shorter point is, this kind of thing happens. The reason is happens is liability. If a criminal organization is using Google's GMail system for planning a robbery, or if a terrorist group decides they want to attack rail systems in Europe and wants to do so by using random public terminals to sign into email accounts that someone else hosts, it's a problem. If law enforcement comes looking and Google has to say "Oh, sorry - we respect privacy so much that we absolutely and permanently delete all traces of all email the second you touch the delete object!", it will not be a pleasant thing. The investigators will not be happy.
That's an interesting point. They might not be happy, but so? Does anyone have a legal (vs. moral) obligation to retain every piece of data Just In Case There's A Terrorist Hiding Under The Bed? Same with corporations. There's no law saying you need to have an email retention period of x, right? Companies do it for business reasons, not because it's mandatory (and in many cases [hello, Microsoft] it's come back to bite them in the ass).
...while this is certainly a technical achievement, is it a useful one? Yeah, who am I to be the arbiter of that, but my mind is boggling. My microwave oven doesn't run linux yet; can someone get hacking on that? Seriously, with all of the real projects that need coders, this falls way off the map into the "There be Dragons" category.
"Linux: We don't have a real UI yet, but it doesn't matter because your garage door opener doesn't need it." [shakes head sadly]
Good semantic point. However, I was taking more the "do whatever it takes and cloak it in whatever kind of half-assed rationalizations needed to justify it" attitude than any concrete moral position.
I don't know, something more like the cd I guess. DRM != No Piracy. This whole argument is ridiculous. If I decrypt my newly purchased Natalie Merchant cd so that I can play it on my Linux laptop why am I suddently considered a pirate? There is a whole world out there much larger then Apple and I happen to live in it. I'm not a sleaziod. I'm a consumer and I love music.
That's it exactly. Because of all of the assholes sharing and decrypting media to share (if anyone trots out DVD Jon now tries to ascribe any pure motives to him I'll puke), it's why you and I do have a problem when we innocently want to do things that really are fair use. I take a majority of my CDs and rip them to MP3 or AAC. But the future these assholes are bringing are fast bringing a day when that will be impossible--or worse, turn me into scum like them.
Your argument boils down to "Please don't exercise fair use because it interferes with fair use".
No, troll, it's "please don't share it and pithily call it "Fair Use" when it's not and then interferes with real fair use."
I consider it a citizens duty to destroy DRM that doesn't allow me to exercise my fair use rights. EULAs are for the weak minded those that worship at the corporate alter.
Well I tell ya, you really bowled me over with your mental prowess here; no weak mind on that end of the monitor. You've totally convinced me of the errors of my thinking..../sarcasm
...sure, I'm all for fair use--for me. My definition doesn't include me and a couple million of my closest friends.
All the Kazaa-using pirate assholes and those cracking Fairplay are doing is making my life harder and as time goes on, interfering more and more with what can be considered fair use. You all need to consider what is cause and what is effect here. Was there DRM before Napster? Nope. So this is all a reaction to your sleazoid thievery and it just royally pisses me off.
As DRM goes, Fairplay is by far the best of a bad lot. Its compromises I can live with. What are you assholes going to make Apple come up with next?
No! Say it ain't so! It's bad enough we export McDonald's and Britney, but now we're exporting our political-correctness?
An "African-American" is a person of African origin living in America. Not all African-Americans are black, and not all blacks are African. Certainly it would be a strange coincidence if this black person in Dublin was visiting from America, and also happened to be originally from Africa.
It almost killed me when I heard a US newscaster refer to Nelson Mandela as African-American. When your world is all round pegs, what can you do when you encounter a square one?
Windows Explorer is an abomination, one of the most functionally unusable programs MS ever released.
However, if you worked at learning its ins and out
I was never willing to make that effort.
Konqueror has some nice features, but I personally feel it's a mistake to have a file and internet browser be the same application, no matter how well the pieces are kept seperate. Mark my words folks, internet browsing and file browsing are seperate tasks. Still, the KDE folks do a good job, and I'm not trying to disparage them here with this paragraph.
Yep, I've said that since Win98 came out and they screwed up the paradigm by switching double clicks to single clicks. I don't know what's the best file browser (though I'm genetically programmed to do things The Mac Way), but the web browser paradigm ain't it...nor is Windows Explorer.
According to the Hollywood trade paper Variety, the dispute centres on a demand by each of the actors that they be paid $360,000 (194,000) an episode instead of their current $125,000.
The increase would see each of them receive $8m a series. The actors work an average of six to seven hours each per episode.
To hell with them. Outsource their voices to India if they can't get by on a measly $20k/hour--I'm sure plenty of people could do Apu!
Well, preach to the converted... But I refuse to view capitalism as something more than the best we've been able to come up with. A fact which should keep us thinking about ways to improving it. Keep an open mind - we are by no means at the end of our imagination and possibilities regarding the organization of economy and society.
We don't need to improve capitalism--we need to improve the greedy, amoral practitioners thereof.
...Yet Another KDE vs Gnome and Dependency Hell Article. Can't call it a review, contrary to the billing.... Personally, I prefer KDE, but that's like saying I prefer dental surgery with a hammer and chisel vs. brain surgery with the same implements.
I prefer the Maoist 'Three Worlds Theory' designations. Mao considered the United States and the USSR to be the 'two superpowers' of the First World, the other modernized countries to be the second world, and the underdeveloped countries to be the third world.
I learned the US and Europe were first world, the (former) Soviet Union was second, and Africa and Asia 3rd. Dunno where the Aussies and Kiwis fit in, now that I think about it.:)
Today, I saw three Mac OS X gurus unable to connect to a nwtwork printer. They knew the ip and the printer type, but they finally gave up and had to call IT for support.
Meanwhile, I directed my browser to CUPS and setup that printer on my Debian Powerbook, with no problems. Then I did it again in my Mac-on-Linux.
The problem isn't interface...its the inability of some people to understand how computers work. And pretty UI's don't fix that.
So was the network cable plugged in? You do know that OS X uses CUPS, too, right? There are clueless people everywhere. The key question is could you have set up the printer on their machines or they on yours?
Ah, but who do they call for tech. support? Is there a 4th world "country" that they can source tech. support to?
That was totally uncalled for. And stop living in the past. There is no way India can be called Third World
There's no more Soviet Union, but 2nd world at best because India is either 1st world or 3rd world depending up where, so it averages to 2nd world. It'll improve when India becomes part of Pakistan, probably.
My mom was a nurse and she delights in telling a story that happened during the 60's. A...dumb woman at her hospital in Chicago misunderstood the birthing form and ended up naming her daughter "Female Brown." She ended up pronouncing it "FeeMahLee" as she didn't want to have to pay for a legal name change for the kid.
Why would you buy a Walmart PC with Linux on it for $300 and then go out and buy Windows for $150+ when you could just go buy a Dell with Windows XP preloaded on it for under $400? Unless you're planning on a five-finger discount on the Windows license it'd be more to buy a Linux box and put a non-OEM copy of Windows on it.
This is like a mechanical engineer publishing tips and tricks on how to break open safes that claim to be "burgler proof." Or Diebold suing someone who figured out how to rig elections. This is like the "wag the dog" scenario where you start a fight with someone to move attention to them and away from your shortcomming.
DVD-Jon also got tried twice for the same crime. I'll stick in the US where double-jeopardy (and a very large back yard to hide in) affrods some sort of protection from that sort of thing.
Tell that to all of the people who get off on state charges only to find themselves facing Federal charges....
Slashdot Mirror
...but there's a hell of a lot of a way to go. I have side by side a Mandrake 9.2 box (still a 2.4.x kernel) and a Mac running OS X 10.3.3 so I'm constantly seeing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
I can't see using the Mac as a server (though it does have apache and postfix), and I can't see using the linux box as a desktop. I can't think of one area in which the linux box is superior to the Mac for desktop use (leaving licensing aside; I'm no free software nazi).
I fire up yon KDE (slightly less offensive than Gnome to me) and shake my head and the crudity and the awkwardness. My overall impression is it's the worst part of imitating Windows without any of the "I'm going to make using this easier for you" benefits it gives.
One of the reasons why the linux kernel is so good compared to everything else is there's someone (with good judgment) who can and will say "that's stupid, we're not going to do that." The KDE and Gnome teams need to do the same thing, as do the CUPS team, etc, etc, etc.
You gotta play to your strengths and while this is a long way from KDE 1.0 that I first used with MKLinux 7 years ago, there sure hasn't been 7 years of evolution from the user end (yeah, I know under the hood is wayyy changed). Maybe 1 year done 7 times....
Anyway, the shorter point is, this kind of thing happens. The reason is happens is liability. If a criminal organization is using Google's GMail system for planning a robbery, or if a terrorist group decides they want to attack rail systems in Europe and wants to do so by using random public terminals to sign into email accounts that someone else hosts, it's a problem. If law enforcement comes looking and Google has to say "Oh, sorry - we respect privacy so much that we absolutely and permanently delete all traces of all email the second you touch the delete object!", it will not be a pleasant thing. The investigators will not be happy.
That's an interesting point. They might not be happy, but so? Does anyone have a legal (vs. moral) obligation to retain every piece of data Just In Case There's A Terrorist Hiding Under The Bed? Same with corporations. There's no law saying you need to have an email retention period of x, right? Companies do it for business reasons, not because it's mandatory (and in many cases [hello, Microsoft] it's come back to bite them in the ass).
...while this is certainly a technical achievement, is it a useful one? Yeah, who am I to be the arbiter of that, but my mind is boggling.
My microwave oven doesn't run linux yet; can someone get hacking on that?
Seriously, with all of the real projects that need coders, this falls way off the map into the "There be Dragons" category.
"Linux: We don't have a real UI yet, but it doesn't matter because your garage door opener doesn't need it."
[shakes head sadly]
Breaking an unjust law does not make you "scum".
Good semantic point. However, I was taking more the "do whatever it takes and cloak it in whatever kind of half-assed rationalizations needed to justify it" attitude than any concrete moral position.
I don't know, something more like the cd I guess. DRM != No Piracy. This whole argument is ridiculous. If I decrypt my newly purchased Natalie Merchant cd so that I can play it on my Linux laptop why am I suddently considered a pirate? There is a whole world out there much larger then Apple and I happen to live in it. I'm not a sleaziod. I'm a consumer and I love music.
That's it exactly. Because of all of the assholes sharing and decrypting media to share (if anyone trots out DVD Jon now tries to ascribe any pure motives to him I'll puke), it's why you and I do have a problem when we innocently want to do things that really are fair use. I take a majority of my CDs and rip them to MP3 or AAC. But the future these assholes are bringing are fast bringing a day when that will be impossible--or worse, turn me into scum like them.
Your argument boils down to "Please don't exercise fair use because it interferes with fair use".
/sarcasm
No, troll, it's "please don't share it and pithily call it "Fair Use" when it's not and then interferes with real fair use."
I consider it a citizens duty to destroy DRM that doesn't allow me to exercise my fair use rights. EULAs are for the weak minded those that worship at the corporate alter.
Well I tell ya, you really bowled me over with your mental prowess here; no weak mind on that end of the monitor. You've totally convinced me of the errors of my thinking....
Sheep. Go say "baaaah" sheep.
Thief. Go to jail, thief.
...sure, I'm all for fair use--for me. My definition doesn't include me and a couple million of my closest friends.
All the Kazaa-using pirate assholes and those cracking Fairplay are doing is making my life harder and as time goes on, interfering more and more with what can be considered fair use.
You all need to consider what is cause and what is effect here. Was there DRM before Napster? Nope. So this is all a reaction to your sleazoid thievery and it just royally pisses me off.
As DRM goes, Fairplay is by far the best of a bad lot. Its compromises I can live with. What are you assholes going to make Apple come up with next?
No! Say it ain't so! It's bad enough we export McDonald's and Britney, but now we're exporting our political-correctness?
An "African-American" is a person of African origin living in America. Not all African-Americans are black, and not all blacks are African. Certainly it would be a strange coincidence if this black person in Dublin was visiting from America, and also happened to be originally from Africa.
It almost killed me when I heard a US newscaster refer to Nelson Mandela as African-American.
When your world is all round pegs, what can you do when you encounter a square one?
Windows Explorer is an abomination, one of the most functionally unusable programs MS ever released.
However, if you worked at learning its ins and out
I was never willing to make that effort.
Konqueror has some nice features, but I personally feel it's a mistake to have a file and internet browser be the same application, no matter how well the pieces are kept seperate. Mark my words folks, internet browsing and file browsing are seperate tasks. Still, the KDE folks do a good job, and I'm not trying to disparage them here with this paragraph.
Yep, I've said that since Win98 came out and they screwed up the paradigm by switching double clicks to single clicks. I don't know what's the best file browser (though I'm genetically programmed to do things The Mac Way), but the web browser paradigm ain't it...nor is Windows Explorer.
I do agree with you on your overall point however; OSS should be pursuing the best of the closed-source technologies.
I guess any originality is out of the question?
Why doesn't the finder give you the full path to the item you have selected so you can copy it and paste it elsewhere.?
Lots of 3rd party pieces do that, or I have an AppleScript that I've had for 10 years doing that.
Why doesn't the finder give me the option of keeping the directory hierarchy together like windows explorer does?
Because it's not Windows Explorer? Windows Explorer is an abomination, one of the most functionally unusable programs MS ever released.
According to the Hollywood trade paper Variety, the dispute centres on a demand by each of the actors that they be paid $360,000 (194,000) an episode instead of their current $125,000.
The increase would see each of them receive $8m a series. The actors work an average of six to seven hours each per episode.
To hell with them. Outsource their voices to India if they can't get by on a measly $20k/hour--I'm sure plenty of people could do Apu!
Well, preach to the converted... But I refuse to view capitalism as something more than the best we've been able to come up with. A fact which should keep us thinking about ways to improving it. Keep an open mind - we are by no means at the end of our imagination and possibilities regarding the organization of economy and society.
We don't need to improve capitalism--we need to improve the greedy, amoral practitioners thereof.
Also, in an effort to more firmly establish Unix ownership rights, SCO is suing Novell, a big Linux vendor
Not yet.
...Yet Another KDE vs Gnome and Dependency Hell Article. Can't call it a review, contrary to the billing....
Personally, I prefer KDE, but that's like saying I prefer dental surgery with a hammer and chisel vs. brain surgery with the same implements.
This reminds me a bit of outsourcing: A short-term shot of money for the stockholders with no thoughts of the long-term consequences. :-(
I prefer the Maoist 'Three Worlds Theory' designations. Mao considered the United States and the USSR to be the 'two superpowers' of the First World, the other modernized countries to be the second world, and the underdeveloped countries to be the third world.
:)
I learned the US and Europe were first world, the (former) Soviet Union was second, and Africa and Asia 3rd.
Dunno where the Aussies and Kiwis fit in, now that I think about it.
Today, I saw three Mac OS X gurus unable to connect to a nwtwork printer. They knew the ip and the printer type, but they finally gave up and had to call IT for support.
Meanwhile, I directed my browser to CUPS and setup that printer on my Debian Powerbook, with no problems. Then I did it again in my Mac-on-Linux.
The problem isn't interface...its the inability of some people to understand how computers work. And pretty UI's don't fix that.
So was the network cable plugged in? You do know that OS X uses CUPS, too, right? There are clueless people everywhere.
The key question is could you have set up the printer on their machines or they on yours?
Ah, but who do they call for tech. support?
Is there a 4th world "country" that they can source tech. support to?
That was totally uncalled for. And stop living in the past. There is no way India can be called Third World
There's no more Soviet Union, but 2nd world at best because India is either 1st world or 3rd world depending up where, so it averages to 2nd world.
It'll improve when India becomes part of Pakistan, probably.
My mom was a nurse and she delights in telling a story that happened during the 60's. A...dumb woman at her hospital in Chicago misunderstood the birthing form and ended up naming her daughter "Female Brown."
She ended up pronouncing it "FeeMahLee" as she didn't want to have to pay for a legal name change for the kid.
Tell that to all of the people who get off on state charges only to find themselves facing Federal charges....
Jeez, anyone who's taken Criminal Justice 101 knows that this is not double jeopardy!Not the legal definition no, but in effect, yes.
Why would you buy a Walmart PC with Linux on it for $300 and then go out and buy Windows for $150+ when you could just go buy a Dell with Windows XP preloaded on it for under $400? Unless you're planning on a five-finger discount on the Windows license it'd be more to buy a Linux box and put a non-OEM copy of Windows on it.
Methinks you answered your own question...
This is like a mechanical engineer publishing tips and tricks on how to break open safes that claim to be "burgler proof." Or Diebold suing someone who figured out how to rig elections. This is like the "wag the dog" scenario where you start a fight with someone to move attention to them and away from your shortcomming.
"Look at the nice wookie over there!"
DVD-Jon also got tried twice for the same crime. I'll stick in the US where double-jeopardy (and a very large back yard to hide in) affrods some sort of protection from that sort of thing.
Tell that to all of the people who get off on state charges only to find themselves facing Federal charges....
...are you still shilling for the Macinotsh on Netware?
:) And behind the AC curtain you are....?
LMAO! That's been known to happen.